The preliminaries for departure were somewhat long in my case, and it was nearly eleven o’clock before I bade adieu to gloomy Clerkenwell. I had, however, been by no means idle. The resumption of my clothing was a matter of time and difficulty; and though they had, by the kindness of the Governor, been considerably taken in to suit my diminished proportions (eighteen inches in the girth and seven stone in weight), retained a hang-down appearance in the vicinity of the neck and shoulders, that involved an immense expenditure of pins and ingenuity. The clothes of prisoners after admission into prison are, as a rule, subjected to a very necessary process. I do not know whether any discretionary power exists as to dispensing with the rule in certain cases, but it seemed incredible that mine should have undergone the usual formula without retaining a vestige of the fact. Clothes are, however, subjected to a process of modified cremation, and placed in airtight lockers, and smoked in a phosphoric preparation supposed to be antagonistic to the respiratory organs of creeping things. But the smell of fire had not passed over mine, and I can only suppose that the ceremony had been dispensed with as a graceful compliment to the executors of my deceased tailor, whose representative I last met at the “House of Detention.” My hat, too, had either considerably expanded, or my head had considerably contracted, for it necessitated at least a yard of brown paper between the brim and my cranium, before being padded to wearable dimensions. As I passed through the office, I caught the first glimpse of myself in a respectably-sized looking-glass, and could hardly believe that the scarecrow I saw was really myself. But what mattered it if I had half a lung more or less than of yore?—I was free! I was not going to die in prison, and contribute in my person an additional item to the dead-house inventory board. With what different sensations did I again find myself in the office which I had not entered since my arrival some months before. It seemed as if all the formula would never be completed, and I would almost have foregone the handsome donation of ten shillings I had earned for laming malefactors to have got out a moment earlier. But business is business, and the labourer is worthy of his hire, and in a few moments I had received a rare gold coin (at least so it appeared to me at the time), known as half-a-sovereign. The warder that had accompanied me from the hospital now sent for a cab, and as I drove through the ponderous gate a load appeared to fall off my mind, and though shattered in health, as I breathed the free air of a London fog, my lungs began to expand as they had not done for months.