Some years later an eye-witness published a graphic account of one of these scenes.[95] Soon after midnight on the Sunday night, for by this time the present practice of executing on Monday morning had been pretty generally introduced, the crowd began to congregate in and about the Old Bailey. Gin-shops and coffee-houses were the first to open doors, and touts began to bid for tenants for the various rooms upstairs. Cries of "Comfortable room!" "Excellent situation!" "Beautiful prospect!" "Splendid view!" resounded on every side. By this time the workmen might be heard busily erecting the gallows; the sounds of hammer and saw intermingled with the broad jeers and coarse jests of the rapidly increasing mob. One by one the huge uprights of black timber were fitted together, until presently the huge stage loomed dark above the crowd which was now ranged round the barriers; a throng of people whom neither rain, snow, storm, nor darkness ever hindered from attending the show. They were mainly members of the criminal [Illustration: PREPARING FOR AN EXECUTION.] classes; their conversation was of companions and associates of former years, long ago imprisoned, transported, hanged, while they, hoary-headed and hardened in guilt, were still at large. They talked of the days when the convicts were hung up a dozen or more in a row; of those who had shown the white, and those who had died game. The approaching ceremony had evidently no terrors for these "idolaters of the gallows." With them were younger men and women: the former already vowed to the same criminal career, and looking up to their elders with the respect due to successful practitioners; the latter unsexed and brutalized by dissipation, slipshod and slovenly, in crushed bonnet and dirty shawl, the gown fastened by a single hook, their harsh and half-cracked voices full of maudlin, besotted sympathy for those about to die. "Above the murmur and tumult of that noisy assembly, the lowing and bleating of cattle as they were driven into the stalls and pens of Smithfield fell with a strange unnatural sound upon the ear.... Hush! the unceasing murmur of the mob now breaks into a loud deep roar, a sound as if the ocean had suddenly broken through some ancient boundary, against which its ever restless billows had for ages battered; the wide dark sea of heads is all at once in motion; each wave seems trying to overleap the other as they are drawn onwards towards this outlet. Every link in that great human chain is shaken, along the whole lengthened line has the motion jarred, and each in turn sees, coiled up on the floor of the scaffold like a serpent, the hangman's rope! The human hand that placed it there was only seen for a moment, as it lay, white and ghastly, upon the black boards, and then again was as suddenly withdrawn, as if ashamed of the deed it had done. The loud shout of the multitude once more subsided, or only fell upon the abstracted ear like the dreamy murmur of an ocean shell.