During my retirement I saw more than one painful death-scene; the one that made the most unpleasant impression on me was that of a living skeleton, who seemed incapable of dying, although too weak to do anything but blaspheme dreadfully, and keep up one incessant groan. He was a man of sixty, and had been in his time the best known and expertest of swell-mobsmen. He had not a relation in the world, and although offered his discharge months before, had nowhere or no one to whom he could go. I saw this man dying for weeks, and eventually stood at his bedside when he took his last gasp. This man had been either a convict or undergoing imprisonment for the last twenty years, and the crime that led to his death in Coldbath was the sacrilege of putting a counterfeit half-crown into a collection plate, and taking out as change a genuine florin. One of the cleaners—an unmitigated thief, but sufficiently good to have qualified for staff employ—had told the warder the day before his death that he knew him to be acquainted with certain persons he named; and with the consideration that characterizes the treatment of prisoners in hospital, no pains were spared to discover the creatures. I saw them next day (two females, known to every policeman in London, the one as the keeper of a thieves’ lodging-house, the other as a “decoy”), actuated by no motive but curiosity and the intimation they had received, standing at the dying man’s bed in their tawdry finery, in company with the priest as attired in chasuble and stole he pronounced the extreme unction for dying sinners. The dying man, the kindly priest, the tawdry females, and the surroundings, formed a picture truly awful, and baffling description. But the end had not yet come; and as the room was again left to its normal condition, banter reassumed its sway, and bets began to be made as to the probable hour of his death. Pots of tea and bread-and-butter were freely wagered, and yet through the livelong night the dying groans, getting feebler and feebler, told how the swell-mobsman was still tussling with death. At five in the morning the end was evidently at hand, and slipping on my clothes, I joined the knot of men attracted to the bedside. The man was happily unconscious; and as the excitement of the sweepstake increased, I can only compare it to the game of roulette, when the ball almost rolls into one compartment and then topples into the next; and “He’s dead now,” “No, he isn’t,” “That’s his last,” followed gasp after gasp, till at a few minutes to six a profound silence announced that the swell-mobsman was gone. (It is only fair to state that much of this occurred unknown to the solitary warder, for what was one amongst so many?) By this time the prison bell was ringing, and the place was astir as day and night warders relieved one another. To stretch, strip, and carry him out of bed were the work of a moment; and what had been a living man a few seconds before had been washed, laid