Look again; it won’t be so bad next time. You look and hold your breath; while you gaze you get used to the semi-darkness and find you are looking into a woman’s cell, for they do divide the sexes after they have been before the magistrate. There is Kate in the corner, but her blucher boots are gone; the gaoler has taken them away because of her persistent kicking at the door. There is the festering piece of humanity in the other corner. There is the young girl who has stolen. There is the mother with her babe, for her fine has not yet been paid; and there are others in that low, square, dark cell, with its sanitary arrangements in the corner, and no female attendant on the premises. Shall we look into the men’s cells? No? You have had enough? So have I. And here comes ‘Black Maria.’ A door at the bottom of the cell-passage is opened, and there stands the prisoners’ van with its steps let down, its back-door open, and its cupboards unfastened, yawning like the grave for their prey. The gaoler hands a list of prisoners to the sergeant in charge of the van, the cell doors one by one are unlocked, from their cells to their cupboards the prisoners go, the cupboard-doors are fastened, the back-door is locked, the whip cracks, and away with its human freight of vice, misery and despair goes the prisoners’ van. And _I_ was there to save them! I went into Kennington Park, sat down, and cried like a child. Thus ended my first day in a London police court. Kind reader, do not say I am talking cant; strictly religious friend, do not say I am impious: but that night I was ‘a man of sorrow, and acquainted with grief’--ay, and for days and months afterwards, for my sleep broke from me; and I wonder how many times in the small hours of the morning my wife has said to me: ‘Now, you are not asleep. You are bothering your head again.’ Why, they were looking at me, mowing and gibing at me, mocking at me, with outstretched hands appealing to me--the people whom I was paid to save and didn’t! If I dozed a little, I then began to talk nonsense, and my wife declares that I repeated ‘Hosey-tosey! Hosey-tosey!’ hundreds of times. I wouldn’t like to go again through my first year’s experience.