There was an off gangway ladder, with a warder standing like a sentinel at the head of it. The convicts were ashore, all of them, saving a few, silent at their trades under deck. A singular hush lay upon the big ship; though the morning was advanced and wide and brilliant, and the river alive with stemming barges and row-boats and sailing craft of all sorts, and alive too on the banks where the Dockyard was, and higher, where were many low wharves and dismantled hulks and riverside public-houses, and higher yet, where the Arsenal was, with its chimneys pouring smoke and feathers of steam darting from great square buildings; such was the stillness upon this slumbering mass of prison hulk, that, as we drew alongside, I could hear no sound but the sob of the stream of tide washing along the bends and an occasional groan of aged timber as the sweep of the water strained the old fabric upon its bed of mud. I bade the waterman wait, got upon the ladder, and ascended. The warder or officer at the gangway inquired my business. I told him I was a visitor come to see one of the convicts, Thomas Butler. He bade me pass on to the quarter-deck, where were assembled two or three groups of persons who were also arrived to visit friends. The people might have come on board by way of a gallery which connected the ship with the shore on the port or left-hand side; this gallery was defended under the forecastle by a huge iron palisade with two strong gates for padlocking. The warder at the gangway spoke to an officer who stood within earshot. He crossed the deck and the shore was hailed, but I know not by whom nor heard what was said. I had lifted my veil to look at the _Childe Harold_ and kept it up. My pulse throbbed fast, and I knew I was very white, but my mood had become resolved by temper. My heart turned sick at the sight of the wide decks with their grimy incumbrances of convicts and officers’ galleys and hammock-houses and other heaped and sordid and filthy-looking structures. I thought of Tom as an innocent man doomed to soul-killing work ashore and heart-breaking immurement in this hulk, locked up below at night with hundreds of felons, many of whom had been fetched by the hands of justice out of the gutters and slums and rookeries of that city whose atmosphere even in the far distance tinged and tainted the blue of the summer sky.