Above the Old Court is a stately dining-room where, during the Old Bailey sittings, the Sheriffs used to give Judges and Court officials, and a few privileged visitors, dinners of rump steak and marrow puddings, according to a bill of fare provided by custom. The custom, I believe, is kept up still. There are two dinners, at 3 and 5 o'clock respectively, and a historic court chaplain is told of who for ten years ate both of these meals each day. There is a reverse to this pleasant picture of the Old Bailey. For many years it was a most unhealthy place to hold court in. The jail fevers which decimated Newgate's population always found their way into the court room. In 1750 the fever caused the death of several judges and Lord Mayor Pennant himself, and whenever there was an epidemic there are records of its effect among the potentates of the Old Bailey. In Chapter 7 of "A Tale of Two Cities," in connection with the trial of Charles Darnay, Dickens writes of the Old Bailey Court: "They hanged at Tyburn in those days, so the street outside of Newgate had not obtained the infamous notoriety that has since attached to it. But the gaol was a vile place, in which most kinds of debauchery and villainy were practiced, and where dire diseases were bred, that came into the Court with the prisoners, and sometimes rushed straight from the dock at my Lord Chief Justice himself, and pulled him off the bench. It had more than once happened that the judge in the black cap pronounced his own doom as certainly as the prisoner's, and even died before him." In the course of the same chapter he describes the accused as standing quiet and attentive, with his hands resting on the slab of wood forming the shelf of the prisoner's dock, "so composedly that they had not displaced a leaf of the herbs with which it was strewn. The Court was all bestrewn with herbs, and sprinkled with vinegar, as a precaution against gaol air and gaol fever." In 1770, Mr. Ackerman, one of the keepers, testified before the House of Commons, which had the question of rebuilding the prison before it, that in the spring of 1750, the jail distemper had spread to the Sessions House, now the Old Bailey, and had caused the death, in addition to two Judges, and the Lord Mayor already alluded to, of several of the jury and others to the number of over sixty persons.