I got Mrs. D. away from the Great Fire with a promise of prison cells and relics of Newgate, and I must admit to a sensation myself when face to face with the door of the condemned cell of Newgate Prison. This particular corner of the Museum makes a bid for popularity with those with a taste for horrors. The prison cells from Neptune Street, in which debtors were confined for indefinite periods for small debts, are an example of old London's cruelty to those of its unfortunate citizens who couldn't pay their way. "Sly House," as the place was called, because of the many who were seen to enter it and never seen to leave it, must have been an object of terror to the impecunious. "Sly House" possessed a subterranean passage to the Tower and the docks, and prisoners were taken thence and embarked on the convict ship _Success_. The wooden walls are scored with the names of some of those wretched human beings who passed months and years in this living tomb. Apparently, they were not all treated as is the man who lies chained from both wrists in the outer cell. He could not have found temporary diversion from his misery in such a task, but this other sitting at a table in the inner cell might answer to one of those names. It is rather difficult to decipher them in the dim light of the lantern which hangs in a corner of the cell, and as I stooped forward my foot inadvertently came in contact with the foot of the frowsy prisoner seated at the table. For an instant I was conscious of an odd sensation of something like fear: not fear of the poor lay figure, but fear of those dark days which, in some curious fashion, the momentary contact had brought _quite close_. It was as if I had stroked a stuffed tiger and it had suddenly snarled and showed its teeth! Quite absurd, of course; a touch of Frankenstein, born of my ambition to make the dry bones live.