Owing to the repeated entreaties of the criminals who could hardly hope to escape the gallows, some show of classification was carried out, and when the inspectors visited Newgate they found the three certain to die in a day-room by themselves; in a second room were fourteen more who had every hope of a reprieve. The whole of these seventeen had, however, a common airing-yard, and took their exercise there at the same time, so that men in the most awful situation, daily expecting to be hanged, were associated continually with a number of those who could look with certainty on a mitigation of punishment. The latter, light-hearted and reckless, conducted themselves in the most unseemly fashion, and "with as much indifference as the inmates of the other parts of the prison." They amused themselves after their own fashion; played all day long at blind-man's-buff and leap-frog, or beat each other with a knotted handkerchief, laughing and uproarious, utterly unmindful of the companionship of men upon whom lay the shadow of an impending shameful death. "Men whose cases were dangerous, and those most seriously inclined, complained of these annoyances," so subversive of meditation, so disturbing to the thoughts; they suffered sickening anxiety, and wished to be locked up alone. This indiscriminate association lasted for months, during the whole of which time the unhappy convicts who had but little hope of commutation were exposed to the mockery of their reckless associates. The brutal callousness of the bulk of the inmates of the press-yard may be gathered from the prison punishment-book, which frequently recorded such entries as the following: "Benjamin Vines and Daniel Ward put in irons for two days for breaking the windows of the day room in the condemned cells." "Joseph Coleman put in irons for three days for striking one of the prisoners," in the same place. There were disputes and quarrels constantly among these doomed men; it was a word and blow, an argument clenched always with a fight. The more peaceably disposed found some occupation in making Newgate tokens, leaden hearts,[86] and "grinding the impressions off penny-pieces, then pricking figures or words on them to give to their friends as memorials." Turnkeys occasionally visited the press-yard, but its occupants were under little or no control. The chaplain, who might have been expected to make these men his peculiar care, and who at one time had visited them frequently, often several times a week, had relaxed his efforts, because, according to his own account, he was so frequently stopped in the performance of his duties. In his evidence before the inspectors he declared that "for years he gave his whole time to his duties, from an early hour in the morning till late in the afternoon. He left off because he was so much interfered with and laughed at, and from seeing that no success attended his efforts, owing to the evils arising from