After all these years I but vaguely remember as much of this horrible jail as we traversed. My heart beat with a pulse of fever; my sight fell dim in the gloom after the whiteness of the day outside. I seemed to see nothing, but I looked always for my sweetheart as we advanced. I recollect little more than the door of Newgate jail, with its flanking of huge, black, fortress-like wall, the iron-grated windows, the heavy, open doors faced with iron, the dark passages, in one of which hung an oil lamp, and the strange sight beyond this gloomy passage of stone floor touched with barred sunlight flowing through an iron grating. Many structural changes have been made in the interior of Newgate since those days. We entered a passage walled on either hand by gratings and wirework. Some warders in high hats and blue coats--warders or constables, I know not which--stood outside this passage. My uncle was at my side, and we waited for my sweetheart to appear. There was but one prisoner then present. He was conversing through the grating with a dark-skinned, black-eyed woman of about forty, immensely stout and dressed in many bright colours. He was clothed in the garb of the felon, and was enormously thick-set and powerfully built; you saw the muscles of his arms tighten the sleeves of his jacket as he gesticulated with Hebraic demonstrativeness to the woman whose voice was as harsh as a parrot’s. His hair was cropped close; where his whiskers and beard were shaved his skin was a dark coarse blue; he was deeply pitted with small-pox; his nose lay somewhat flat upon his face with very thick nostrils; his brows were black and heavily thatched, and the eyes they protected were coal black as the Indian’s, but amazingly darting. My uncle looked at him with interest, and whispered: ‘I was at that man’s trial. He was sentenced to the hulks and to transportation for life for receiving stolen goods and keeping a notorious house. He is a Jew prize-fighter, and one of the very best that ever stood up in a ring. Three years ago he beat the Scotch champion Sandy Toomer into pulp. He’s a terrible ruffian, and a villain of the deepest dye, but a noble prize-fighter, and I am sorry for Barney Abram.’ The felon took no notice of us spite of my uncle staring at him, as though he had been one of the greatest of living men. I glanced at the horrid creature, but thought only of Tom.