At 6 A.M.—and in November this means in the pitch dark—a bell rings; not a heavy tolling bell, but a shrill, sharp hand bell, wrung with all the vigour that a prison warder can impart to it. He walks up and down the long and dreary passages, the noise rising and falling as he approaches and recedes. I sat up on my pallet of horsehair, and took it for granted I had better get up. By the considerate thoughtfulness of our free and enlightened Government every requisite for a (hurried) toilet is here provided, obviating the very slightest necessity for ever leaving one’s apartments. A tap and diminutive brass basin, a water-closet (guaranteed, I should say, to produce typhoid in a marvellously short space of time), a piece of yellow soap the size of a postage stamp, and a towel of the solidity of the main sheet of an ironclad, and bearing unmistakable “marks of the beasts” that had been my immediate predecessors, were all at hand, leaving no excuse for the most whimsical for abstaining from a thorough good (official) wash. I found, as my experience increased, that the two things most neglected in Her Majesty’s prisons are cleanliness and godliness. A terrible make-believe distinguishes them both; but if you only burnish up the outside of the cup and the platter, the inside may, figuratively speaking, be full of dead men’s bones. I shall adduce very good reasons for these assertions when time and my destiny have “settled me down” in Coldbath Fields. After a delay of half-an-hour the counting process began, which consisted of a whole cloud of turnkeys passing rapidly in front of the various cell doors. A little further delay, and I was invited to “exercise.” I went out once and only once, for as a philosopher one must pocket one’s foolish likes and dislikes, and endeavour to see everything; but the penance was so fearful that I had a word with the doctor, and obtained exemption from that date. Conceive, then, a large and bleak courtyard, flagged and partially gravelled, bounded on three sides by the prison walls, and on the fourth by high railings and a still higher wall beyond it; conceive, too, a couple of hundred of the scum of London, the halt and the lame, the black chutnee seller and the mendicant newsvendor, with here and there some unfortunate devil like myself in the garb of a gentleman; add to this a warder standing on a pedestal at each corner, and another roaming round in the centre, and then cap this awful picture by watching this frowsy tag-rag mass walking round in a circle about a yard apart, and you may possibly form some slight notion of my feelings. When I got to the outer door that led into the yard, I hesitated for a moment, and I told a warder that I really did not think I could face the ordeal; but he advised me, in what was kindly meant, to have a try, and that if I walked round no one would take a bit of notice of me. I found this assurance was hardly strictly correct, for my huge size and evident