'I thought not, by the look of you. Well, there's the master's side next; the fee for admission is only thirteen and sixpence: irons, half a guinea: the rent of a bed or part of a bed half a crown, and as for your food, what you like to order and pay for. No credit at this tavern, which is the sign of the Clinking Iron. Will that suit you?' 'No, I can pay nothing.' 'Then why waste time asking questions? There's the common side; you've got to go into that, and very grateful you ought to be that there is a common side at all for such a filthy Beast as you.' My choice must needs be the last because I had no money at all: not a single solitary shilling--my obliging friends when they put their purse into my pocket as a proof of the alleged robbery, abstracted my own--which no doubt the worthy Professor of Sacred Theology had in his pocket while he was explaining the nature of the attack to the Constable. The turnkey while he grumbled about waste of time--a prisoner ought to say at once if he had no money: officers of the Prison were not paid to tell stories to every ragged, filthy footpad; the common side was as good as any other on the way to Tyburn: what could a ragamuffin covered with blood and filth expect?--picked out a pair of irons: they were the rustiest and the heaviest that he could find: as he hammered them on he said that for half a crown he would drive the rivet into my heel only that he would rob his friend Jack Ketch of the pleasure of turning off a poor whining devil who came into Newgate without a copper. 'Damme!' he cried, as he finished his work, 'if I believe you ever tried to rob anyone!' 'I did not,' I replied. At which he laughed, recovering his good temper, and opening a door shoved me through and shut it behind me. The common side of Newgate is a place which, though I was in it no more than two hours or so, remains fixed in my memory and will stay there as long as life remains. The yard was filled to overflowing with a company of the vilest, the filthiest, and the most shameless that it is possible to imagine. They were pickpockets, footpads, shoplifters, robbers of every kind; they were in rags; they were unwashed and unshaven; some of them were drunk; some of them were emaciated by insufficient food--a penny loaf a day was doled out to those who had no money and no friends: that was actually all that the poor wretches had to keep body and soul together: the place was crowded not only with the prisoners, but with their friends and relations of both sexes; the noise, the cursings, the ribald laugh; the drunken song; the fighting and quarrelling can never be imagined. And, in the narrow space of the yard which is like the bottom of a deep well, there is no air moving, so that the stench is enough, at first, to make a horse sick.