“A shout! Another! another yet, though few knew why, or what it meant. But those around the gate had seen it slowly yield and drop from its topmost hinge. It hung on that side by but one, but it was upright still because of the bar, and of its having sunk of its own weight into the heap of ashes at its foot. There was now a gap at the top of the doorway, through which could be descried a gloomy passage, cavernous and dark. Pile up the fire! “It burnt fiercely. The door was red hot and the gap wider. They vainly tried to shield their faces with their hands, and standing as if in readiness for a spring, watched the place. Dark figures, some crawling on their hands and knees, some carried in the arms of others, were seen to pass along the roof. It was plain the gaol could hold out no longer. The keeper and his officers and their wives and children were escaping. Pile up the fire! “The door sank down again; it settled deeper in the cinders--tottered--yielded--was down!” Dickens gives a prominent place among the rioters to John Dennis the hangman, who himself was, as the records state, sentenced to be hanged for his complicity in these dark doings. Dennis was likely to be familiar with the interior of the gaol. There were no doubt many others who had threaded its gloomy passages before. With such experienced guides the way must have been easy to find. The outer barriers down, the mob surged like a tidal wave into and through the whole gaol. I will again draw from fiction, which is the more powerful in this case that it is founded upon fact, and will quote from ‘Barnaby Rudge.’ “Now they came rushing through the gaol, calling to each other in the vaulted passages; clashing the iron gates dividing yard from yard; beating at the doors of cells and wards; wrenching off bolts and locks and bars; tearing down the door-posts to let men out; endeavouring to drag them by main force through gaps and windows where a child could scarcely pass; whooping and yelling without a moment’s rest, and running through the heat and flames as if they were cased in metal. By their legs, their arms, the hair upon their heads, they dragged the prisoners out. Some threw themselves upon their captives as they got towards the door, and tried to file away their irons; some danced about them with a frenzied joy, and rent their clothes, and were ready as it seemed to tear them limb from limb. Now a party of a dozen men came dashing through the yard, ... dragging a prisoner along the ground, whose dress they had nearly torn from his body in their mad eagerness to set him free, and who was bleeding and senseless in their hands. Now a score of prisoners ran to and fro who had lost themselves in the intricacies of the prison, and were so bewildered with the noise and the [Illustration]