of the intended kindness to me.  Next morning I complained to the Governor, who assured me he should have made no objection to the “luxury” of a fowl; in short, I had been the victim of the zeal of an illiterate and astute official, who, putting two and two together, and weighing the probable effect of his veto on an inexperienced inhabitant of the outer world, had arrived at a very happy arrangement whereby I was deprived and he benefited to the extent of a well-selected hamper.  I found the Governor a very good sort.  His suit of dittos was a little of the “thunder and lightning” pattern; but if his clothes were loud, his manners were not—in short, he was essentially a gentleman, both in appearance and manners, a beau ideal of the heavy dragoon that existed before the Cardwellite era.  I purposely refer to his manners being those of a gentleman because it does not always occur that those situated in a similar position possess the higher recommendation.

The “House of Detention” appeared to me the most awfully depressing place to which my erring footsteps had ever led me.  The darkness, the stillness, the novelty of the situation, all tended to this conclusion; and I cannot do better than describe what occurred, and leave the verdict in the hands of the reader.  Conceive then a man, who an hour previously was a free citizen, suddenly finding himself stepping out of a police van into a gloomy, white-washed passage, and being inspected and counted with a dozen others by a bumptious turnkey, puffed out with his own importance, addicted, as I have previously mentioned, to cold fowl and tongue, but otherwise oblivious to the veriest rudiments of civilization.  Conceive, then, the sensations of a man such as I, finding himself suddenly confronted by such a biped, who, scanning first a paper and then you, begins to drawl out, “What’s your name?  Your age?  Married or single?  Protestant or Romanist?” and a volley of such like rubbish, which only tends to exasperate one, and which might well be dispensed with, seeing that all the desired information is on the paper, and, having been supplied by one’s self not an hour before, is sure to be corroborated, whether correct or not, and considering, too, that this farce is repeated every time you enter and leave the place, and which in a case of frequent remands might occur twice a day.  One can hardly narrate a single item regarding the treatment of an untried prisoner that does not call for redress, i.e., if the absurd theory is still persisted in that an untried man is an innocent one.  What right has an innocent man to be debarred the privilege of seeing friends (under reasonable restrictions) as often as he pleases, instead of being limited to one visit of fifteen minutes a day?  Why should one be allowed to purchase Town Talk and not Truth?  Why should the Graphic be permitted and not the Dramatic News?  These are anomalies no logic can explain away, and have no right to be left to the caprice of a prison official.  The food supply as at present arranged is a cruel system; a prisoner under remand is gratified at hearing that he may procure his own food, and naturally shrinks at the idea of subsisting on prison fare till absolutely compelled.  No greater mistake ever was made—the latter is good, clean, and supplied gratis; the former is nasty in the extreme, and scandalously dear.  If the doubtful “privilege” is to be continued, it is time the government, in common fairness, controlled the tariff; at present a prisoner is at the mercy of the eating-house keeper, and liable to any charge he may choose to make.  I must admit that the caterers for the “House of Detention” were civil and comparatively reasonable, whereas those at Newgate were exactly the opposite.  I shall give a detailed account later on of how I was fleeced at the Old Bailey, and I would earnestly warn all prisoners awaiting trial to stick to the prison fare, and carefully to avoid the refreshments supplied from the cat’s meat houses in the neighbourhood.  With these slight digressions I shall proceed to a description of the routine at the “House of Detention,” with its rules and regulations and privileges, and the impressions they conveyed to me; and I cannot do better than impress on the reader that this book makes no pretensions to literary merit, but must be regarded rather as a journal of facts, whose principle claim is based on their having been written by a man who is probably as well known as any in England.  I ask no praise, I’m equally oblivious to abuse; criticism I’m absolutely indifferent to, being convinced that either my notoriety, my popularity, my identity, or unpopularity, will procure me readers far in excess of any book of greater merit; and it is a consolation to feel that my friends will be glad that I got through some months with a degree of comfort never before paralleled, and my enemies (male and especially female) will be chagrined at discovering that “Imprisonment with Hard Labour” in my case meant kindness from first to last hardly credible, absolutely devoid of any labour at all, and accompanied with luxuries as regards eating and drinking that could not have been surpassed had I been stopping at a first-class hotel and paying thirty shillings a day for board and lodging.  Many apparent contradictions may moreover suggest themselves, but taken in the light of a diary, these contradictory views must be regarded as reflecting circumstances as they appeared to me from time to time under various phases.  Suffice it to say that I have carefully avoided exaggeration, that everything I narrate can be fully substantiated, and may be unhesitatingly accepted as the experiences of a man endowed with an average amount of brains, who kept his eyes wide open, and who had opportunities given him that no man ever had before, whether higher or lower in the social or criminal scale, of seeing a vast amount of the “dark side of nature.”  In my innocence I once fancied I had seen a good deal, and knew a lot; but the following narrative will prove that I was a very babe and suckling, before I became a “Government ward.”  Heaven forbid that anyone should purchase his experience at such a price; nevertheless, on the principle that has guided me through life of trying to see everything and do everything, I can only attempt to justify my escapades by endorsing the theory (slightly altered) of the immortal Voltaire, that a man who would go through what I have is “un fois un philosophe, mais deux fois un criminel déterminé.”

CHAPTER III.
“SETTLING DOWN.”

Fresh arrivals appear to come to this awful place at every hour of the day and night.  The police courts belch forth their motley loads on an average about twice a day, and when the Sessions are “on,” prisoners arrive as late as nine and ten of a night, and the rumbling of “Black Marias,” the shouting of warders, the turning of keys, the slamming of doors, and a hundred other “regulations” that make night hideous, lead one to imagine oneself in a third-class hostelry alongside a railway station.  The absence of clocks, too, that strike (for even they are on the silent system), combined with the primitive hour of retiring to rest, bewilders one in arriving at anything like an approximate idea of time between the bell at night and the bell at 6 A.M.  After my first interview with Mr. Vaughan, and with the sound of his