“The only articles of furniture the place contained were these:--First and most prominent, was a gigantic row of stocks similar in its construction to that formerly used in England, dilapidated specimens of which may still be seen in some of the market places of our country towns. It was capable of accommodating more than a dozen occupants. Several smaller varieties of the same species lay around, each holding by the leg a pair of hapless victims consigned to its custody. These stocks were heavy logs of timber bored with holes to admit the feet and fitted with wooden pins to hold them fast. In the centre of the apartment was placed a tripod holding a large earthen cup filled with earth oil to be used as a lamp during the night watches; and lastly, a simple but suspicious looking piece of machinery, whose painful uses it was my fate to test before many hours had elapsed. It was merely a long bamboo suspended from the roof by a rope at each end and worked by blocks or pulleys to raise or depress it at pleasure. “The prison had never been washed, nor even swept, since it was built. So I was told, and I have no doubt it was true, for, besides the ocular proof from its present condition, it is certain no attempt was made to cleanse it during my subsequent tenancy of eleven months. This gave a kind of fixedness or permanency to the fetid odours, until the very floors and walls were saturated with them. Putrid remains of castaway animal and vegetable stuff which needed no broom to make it ‘move on’--the stale fumes from thousands of tobacco pipes--the scattered ejections of the pulp and liquid from their everlasting betel, and other nameless abominations still more disgusting, which strewed the floor--and if to this be added the exudation from the bodies of a crowd of never-washed convicts, encouraged by the thermometer at 100 degrees, in a den almost without ventilation--is it possible to say what it smelled like? As might have been expected from such a state of things, the place was teeming with creeping vermin to an extent that very soon reconciled me to the plunder of the greater portion of my dress.