He went along, shaking his head in a dubious way and looking back several times at me, clearly either suspicious of the genuineness of my stupendous ignorance, or unable to comprehend how anyone could be ignorant of the identity of the famous jail. I have no doubt that it was vastly stupid of me. In fact, I experienced a certain feeling of contempt for myself, now that I knew what the place was, and that it was the place of which I had read so much that I almost had its history by heart; but after all, London is a "very considerable-sized town," as I once had a Chicago acquaintance generously admit, and one could scarcely be expected to know it like a guide-book, within forty-eight hours after making first acquaintance with its bitter beer, its bloody beef, and its beds into whose coverlids the essence of the fog seemed to have penetrated, if, indeed, the sheets were not woven out of the fog itself. Newgate, in its external appearance, at least, is an ideal prison. Its aspect, whether purposely or through the adaptation of its construction to its uses, is thoroughly jail-like. The few openings in the walls, the empty blind niches, which might have been left there for statues of great felons never set up in them; the entrance, with its festooned fetters carved in stone as an ornament to the gloomy and forbidding portal, all are appropriate to and a significant part of it. Within a few feet of where I stood when I viewed it first was the spot where the scaffold used to be put up. Here, on the occasion of an execution, as one may read in Chapter 52 of "Oliver Twist," the space before the prison was cleared, and a few strong barriers painted black thrown across the road to break the pressure of the crowd, while the more favored portion of the audience occupied every post of vantage, at windows and housetops, that commanded a view of the ghastly show. Here, as Oliver noted when he came away from his last interview with Fagin at the dawn of day: "A great multitude had already assembled; the windows were filled with people smoking and playing cards to beguile the time; the crowd was pushing, quarreling and joking. Everything told of life and animation, but one dark cluster of objects in the very centre of all--the black stage, the crossbeam, the rope, and all the hideous apparatus of death."