Between the Old Bailey Court House and the condemned ward of Newgate is a yard called the Press Yard. The name has a hideous origin. This spot was for many years the scene of one of the most terrible tortures ever inflicted by the cruelty of man upon his kind, the awful torture of "Pressing to Death." This torture was imposed on prisoners held for higher crimes, like treason and felonies, who refused to answer in court. Nowadays, this would be construed into contempt of court. Until a century ago it was held an offense so hideous as to warrant death by torture. Nowadays we do not ask a prisoner to criminate himself. Then, if he did not, he was tortured; if he did he was punished anyway. The prisoner condemned to be pressed was stripped naked, except, for decency's sake, a cloth around the loins, and laid on his back on the pavement. Then iron weights were piled upon a board placed on his body, in increasing number, and on a diet of three morsels of bread a day and three draughts of water, he was left to perish miserably. He never needed a full day's rations. Sometimes he lasted for hours, and at others, as in the case of Mayor Strangeways, who was pressed for the murder of John Fussel in 1659, he died in a few moments. This poor wretch was stoned by the mob in the prison yard while undergoing the torture. Highwaymen, house-breakers, forgers, utterers of forged and counterfeit money, as well as murderers and traitors, were pressed to death. Brutal and callous as the era was, the shocking practice excited such denunciation in time that the victims were finally subjected to the torture privately in the room known as the Press Room whose door opens into the Press Yard. But the practice of pressing was kept up until as late as 1770. The Press Yard to this day is devoted to quite as gloomy and deadly, if less revolting, service under sanction of the law. It is here that the executions of Newgate are performed. The gallows is set up close to the door out of which the prisoner is brought. There is no march to the gibbet through a throng of spectators as in most of our own jails. The doomed man gets his last glimpse of the sky through a stone funnel down which no ray of sunlight ever finds its way. As far as I remember, from my London days, the only sign the outer world has of the work going on within the prison walls is the hoisting of a black flag over the lodge, and I know not if even this ceremonial is still observed. From the gallows to the grave in Newgate used to be but a step. There was an old burying ground in the prison, now disused, which was opened in 1820. Thistlewood and the other Cato Street Conspirators were the first criminals buried in it. They were buried in the night on the day of their execution, without services, and many others like them in after years. A pit and a shroud of quicklime were the appropriate Newgate epitaph.