He rescued Billy from the two urchins who had dropped their game to pinch his calves, and addressed a word to one of the turnkeys, at the same time passing a coin. The fellow looked at it and touched his hat. "Second court, first floor, number thirty-seven." He opened a wicket in the gate. "This way, please, and sharp to the left." The narrow court into which we descended by a short flight of steps was, as I remember, empty; but passing under an archway and through a kind of tunnel we entered a larger one crowded with men, some gathered in groups, others pacing singly and dejectedly, the most of them slowly too, with bowed heads, but three or four with fierce strides as if in haste to keep an appointment. One of them, coming abreast of us as the turnkey led us off to a staircase on the left, halted, drew himself up, stared at us for a moment with vacant eyes, and hurried by; yet before we mounted the stairs I saw him reach the farther wall, wheel, and come as hastily striding back. The stairway led to a filthy corridor, pierced on the left with a row of tiny windows looking on the first and empty courtyard; and on the right with a close row of doors, the most of which stood open and gave glimpses of foul disordered beds, broken meats, and barred windows crusted with London grime. The smell was pestilential. Our turnkey rapped on one of the closed doors, and half-flung, half-kicked it open; for a box had been set against it on the inside. "Visitors for the Baron!" he announced, and stood aside to let us enter. My father had ordered Billy to wait below. We two passed in together. Now, my father, as I have said, was tall; yet it seemed to me that the man who greeted us was taller, as he rose from the bed and stood between us and the barred dirty window. By little and little I made out that he wore an orange-coloured dressing-gown, and on his head a Turk's fez; that he had pushed back a table at which, seated on the bed, he had been writing; and that on the sill of the closed window behind him stood a geranium-plant, dry with dust and withering in the stagnant air of the room. But as yet, since he rose with his back to the little light, I could not make out his features. I marked, however, that he shook from head to foot. My father bowed--a very reverent and stately bow it was too--regarded him for a moment, and, taking a pace backward to the door, called after the retreating turnkey, to whom he addressed some order in a tone to me inaudible. "You are welcome, Sir John," said the prisoner, as my father faced him again; "though to my shame I cannot offer you hospitality." He said it in English, with a thick and almost guttural foreign accent, and his voice shook over the words. "I have made bold, sire, to order the remedy." "'Sire!'" the prisoner took him up with a flash of spirit. "You have many rights over me, Sir John, but none to mock me, I think."