Newgate, and which contrasted strangely with the other customs, was that of the chief warder as he finally counted us at night. This official, having glared at you with an expression such as the rattlesnake may be presumed to give the guinea-pig just before dinner, invariably said “Good night!” I was so struck by this unique and time-honoured custom that I asked my friend and valet—for he cleaned out my cell and did other jobs for me—Mr. Mike Rose what it meant. “Well,” he said, “they gets into a sort of perlite way like, ’cos whenever a cove swings they nigh allus shakes hands with ’im, and maybe this is ’ow they gits perlite like.” There was something so original in this logic that I could not but be impressed by it, and though I failed to discover the connection between the two circumstances, still I had realized that Mr. Mike Rose was a bit of a character and worth cultivation. Very shortly after my incarceration in the thermometer-furnished cell I was visited by the surgeon, and having obtained his permission to have a bed instead of a hammock, a wooden tressel was brought in with sheets, bolster, and blankets. I at once proceeded to make my couch, deeming bed the best place on such a cold and cheerless afternoon; and 6 o’clock P.M. found me in bed, vainly endeavouring to get warm, with my eye fixed on the thermometer, and muffled up to the chin with sheets and blankets, all of which were stamped in letters three inches long with the ominous words “NEWGATE PRISON.” I really believed that my first night’s experience at the “House of Detention” was sufficiently awful, but it was nothing to my sensations here. The associations of the place, the idea that many a murderer had probably occupied this very cell, and possibly slept in these identical bed-coverings, all forced themselves upon me. The bells of the numerous churches which abound round Newgate also seemed desirous of adding to one’s misery by joyful peals; they were practising their weekly bell-ringing, and one chime was repeating over and over again—in mockery of me, as it were—Haydn’s “Hymn of the Creation,” and “The Heavens are telling” kept floating into my ears through granite walls and iron bars; and though I tried very hard to stifle sound by burying myself under the “broad-arrowed” bed-clothing, all my efforts were futile, till sleep, kind sleep, took pity on me, and I wandered in my dreams far away from my dreadful abode, only to be recalled to the hideous reality by the mournful prison bell, and— “Sorrow returned with the light of the morn, And the voice in my dreaming ear melted away.”