Chapel was an infliction one was subjected to four times a week. The service in its entirety was conducted with a strict regard to official etiquette, and the degrees of relative rank were as clearly defined by the Bibles and prayer-books as by the seats, hassocks, reading desks, etc., allotted to the officials. Thus, the Governor’s Bibles and prayer-books were gilt-bound, with gilt clasps; the deputy Governor’s, Scripture-reader’s, and schoolmaster’s, gilt bindings without the clasps; the principal warders’, clasps without the gilt binding; and those of the rank-and-file of warders destitute of either gilt binding or clasps. Prisoners had to content themselves with thumbed, dog-eared, leafless specimens, and so the united hallelujahs ascended to Heaven—let us hope equally acceptable, whether dog-eared or gilded. The interior of this sacred edifice resembled a barn, the nave being fitted up with rows of backless benches capable of accommodating some 600 knaves, a yard apart. A bird’s-eye view of this congregation was one that challenged reflection, comprising as it did young men and old, dark and fair, short and stout, tall and thin, lads with fluff, and hoary-headed sinners, all stamped with the same mark of Cain—hang-dog faces and protruding jowls, conical heads with hair extending down the nape, bullet pates and cadaverous faces, cripples and blind men, one-legged and one-armed, yet all, with few exceptions, marked with the same indescribable jail-bird brand never to be mistaken, and once seen never to be forgotten. The floor was tesselated (of the alms-house period), and one of the hardest floors with which I had ever come in contact. I realized this from a regulation that necessitated one’s grovelling on the slightest provocation. The walls of this portion of the building were of a bilious-official mud colour, the monotony of which was occasionally relieved by scrolls and texts of a personal nature. Beyond were a few steps leading to the pulpits and pews for the higher officials; here the mural decorations assumed a brighter form—indeed, paint seemed to have been laid on regardless of expense, and with a degree of vulgarity I had never seen equalled, except perhaps in Albert Grant’s lately pulled-down house at South Kensington. The mania for smearing the walls with texts was by no means confined to the chapel, but was to be found everywhere that propriety and extreme religious fervour seemed to suggest. Thus over the surgery, as a reminder to possible schemers, “lying lips” were very properly condemned; near the stores advice as to “picking and stealing” was conspicuously displayed, with about as much effect as if it had been placed in the oakum-picking wards; and everywhere, conspicuous _by its absence_, was the wholesome admonition, “If any man among you seem to be religious, and bridleth not his tongue, this man’s religion is vain.”