“The moment the last gate was unbarred we found ourselves in a place which it would require the imagination of a Dante to paint. I could understand that if this had been visited first, I should have considered the upper floor a comfortable residence. Some were lying on the floor; others crowded together on the miserable truckle beds, howling and blaspheming and evidently always addressed and treated as brutes. Some had climbed up to the open bars and were jeering at the people in the street. It was vice in all its degradation and horror; human life in a living tomb assisting at the spectacle of its own decay, its own rottenness. The atmosphere was thick as a London fog from the horrible exhalations. The men here were wild to tell me their stories; some caught hold of my clothes, others scribbled their names on pieces of paper and thrust them into my hand, which they seized and covered with their pestilential kisses. I spoke to one old man who had been confined there twenty-five years--twenty-five years in such a place!--and he pretended, I know not with what truth, that to that day he had never been tried. I asked the officers if this was the case, but it was so long since his arrival that they could not give me any definite information. When the wretched beings were told that I could do nothing for them, their expressions of sorrow were loud and bitter. I was not sorry when, after quite forcing a way through the crowd, we reached the gates and I heard the last bar drawn which shut the poor creatures out from all hope.”