Mr. Woolfe had got me the regulations of the prison ship; I knew at what time the convicts went ashore to their forced labour, the hour they returned to dinner, when they returned again to their tea or supper, and at what time the hatches were put over them and padlocked for the night. Indeed, I could say off the regulations and every article in the list of the prison fare by heart, and I lived in imagination in the horrid routine of the ship. I once had a burning desire to visit the huge hulk at night when all the people were at rest in their hammocks within her and the hatches on. I had plenty of spirit as a young woman, and was, on the whole, a fearless young creature; but I own I shrank from trusting myself alone in a wherry at night on the Thames with one of the watermen of those times. I asked Will if he would accompany me. He cheerfully consented, and I arranged with a fellow at Wapping to await us at Blackwall, to save the circuit at Limehouse and Greenwich Reaches. It was a night about the middle of September, somewhat cold, but not uncomfortably so. We reached the hulk, and lay off her close in, the waterman quietly plying to keep his boat steady in the stream. The sky was dim and the stars gleamed sparely; there was just weight enough of wind to run the water sobbing along the bends of the towering, motionless old seventy-four. The shore was dotted with spots of light, and under every one of them a thread of gold wavered like a wriggling eel striking for the depths. The deep hush of the night lay sensibly as the darkness itself upon the flat marshes of Plumstead and across the river where the Plaistow level stretched. The passing ships went by silent as shadows. Now and again a man’s voice would sound aboard one of them; I’d hear the rumbling of a yard suddenly let go or the rattling of the hanks of canvas leisurely hoisting. Here and there the grated ports of the hulk showed in a square of dim light, but even as I watched a clear-tongued bell on board was twice struck. ‘Nine o’clock,’ said Will, and as though a cloud had passed over the huge fabric every light went out; the white bands of the checkered sides seemed to hover out upon the eye--pallid and ghastly with their wild grin of grated ports; the pole masts died out away up in the gloom. ‘How many convicts are there aboard?’ asked Will. ‘Over four hundred, sir,’ answered the waterman. The lad seemed awed by the thought of that number. Not yet would sleep have visited the weariest of those eyes within, and the fancy of the mass of human suffering and crime and sorrow lying mute and awake, with no other sound about the ship than the sob of running water, made the silence of her awful. I stood up, and my heart gave away in a cry of passion and misery, and scarcely sensible of what I did I extended my arms toward the hulk and moaned: