"Now ye see," said Ralph, "I knew he was of gaffin me, for he was not worth two pounds, body and soul, and I don't suppose he never made more than half a crown in a day and do his best. Then Old Benjamin spends it hall in fish. The Jew peddlers here are wery fond of fish on Saturdays. They would go without a meal in three days to have a fresh mackerel on Sunday. And they are werry pertikler as to who kills the meat before they buys it." Determining to make another attempt to see Petticoat Lane on a week day, I bade the polite policeman and the highly odorous quarter of the Old Clothes sellers, a very good day. CHAPTER X. FROM NEWGATE TO TYBURN. LET us look at Newgate. This stern old pile of stones heaped upon stones, grey and grim, the burden of whose sighs afflict the weary skies above. The strangest kind of a fascination hung over me as I looked at its Gate, cut in the deep wall like the entrance to a rocky cave. The spiked sill spoke of gibbets, the bars and locks and bolts of a felon gang, who dragged their blind life away, day following day, for them without hope, the outside world vacant, dumb and blank as the Ages, to their crime begotten souls, whose only music was the clank of fetters and the hoarse grating of iron hinges. The building itself, covering half an acre, seemed sealed like a sepulchre. There was nothing to be gotten out of it, one way or the other. No one can have even looked at this terrible prison of Newgate without a shudder of despair for his kind. Only on certain recurring Black Mondays did it yawn like a grave in the face of a great swearing mob, to put forth something into the open in the shadow of St. Sepulchre's, that was half dead; to take it back after an hour quite dead; and then it relapsed into its old, inscrutable dumbness. Now Gate of Ivory, now Gate of Horn--now a porch above which might be inscribed the despairing legend of the Inferno, now a wicket at which the charitable might tap gently, fraught with messages of mercy to the fallen creatures within--the portal of Newgate could assume chameleon hues, not always hopeless. Next to the spikes of Newgate, the visitor must always mark for lasting remembrance, the stones of Newgate doorsteps. They are not perhaps more than eighty years old, but they look more worn than the jambs of Temple bar--more decayed than the wheel windows of the Cloisters of Westminster Abbey. They are ancient through use, and not through time. The Hall of the Lost Footsteps at Versailles is but an empty name, but the millions of footsteps that have worn Newgate stones, must make it an abiding reality. Here have united all the crooked roads. Here have fallen the last steps on the stones of the ford of the Black River. Beyond the steps has loomed the City of Dis. How many footsteps! how many!