the nature of the building to which it gives
admittance, a set of iron fetters.

We are, in fact, outside the jail of Newgate.
One of those great facts, without whose presence
among us we might—immersed as we are in the
pursuit of business or pleasure—forget the
existence of crime and the necessity for its
punishment, is here before us. Such appeals to one's
senses are met with in this world from time to
time. We are apt to forget the crimes which
disfigure our commonwealth till we are reminded
of them by the sight of a prison, or a prison
van; just as we forget all about death till we
meet a funeral, or pass an undertaker's shop.

It is twelve o'clock at night, and darkness
lies over the great city. The number of passengers
whose garments come in contact with the
stones of the prison wall has diminished very
greatly, though it has not yet reached its minimum.
How hurriedly they pass along, and how
few have leisure to steal a glance up at those
frowning walls, or to think for what purpose
they are there. This is, in fact, no lounging-place
for idlers. Few come this way, few frequent
this dingy ill-favoured locality, unless brought
here by business of some kind or other. It is
an ugly corner of the world this, and no man
would seek it out for his pleasure.

And yet there is one person who has for some
considerable time occupied a position here, who
would not seem to have been brought to this
place by any matter connected with business on
this particular night. Standing on the edge of
the pavement which borders that open space
already spoken of, on the side opposite to that
occupied by the jail wall, is the figure of a
woman, motionless as a statue, dark as a fate.

The woman is dressed in common garments,
and is closely muffled in a woollen shawl, and
she has stood in this one place for upwards of
an hour without stirring. From the position
which she has taken up, she can see the whole
of the edifice opposite, from the point where a
small yard divides it from the court-house
of the Old Bailey to where it is bounded by the
busy thoroughfare of Newgate-street. All this
length of wall, together with the indications of
buildings within it which appear above the
chevaux-de-frise, she has continually scanned
with a curious yet satisfied eye. No circumstance
connected with that piece of solid
masonry escapes her, no incident connected
with the jail, such as the entrance or exit of an
official at one of the doors, or a change of duty
among the policemen about the place, is lost
upon her. Her eye sweeps the whole building
from end to end, and from side to side, with a
sort of grim pleasure such as this gloomy
spectacle does not for the most part afford.

By-and-by she moves, and crossing this open
space, in which carts laden with hay and straw
are standing in considerable numbers, waiting
for next day's market, she arrives under the
very prison walls on the opposite side of the
way, and commences a nearer examination of
them. She passes along under the massive
stonework, scrutinising it as she walks by.
She gazes up at the small closed doors, peering
into their fastenings and their hinges of iron.
She follows thus the entire course of the wall
along the Old Bailey and Newgate-street, and
then pursuing that thoroughfare, she turns
aside into the narrow street about Newgate-
market, and seeks to get some glimpses of that
eastern side of the jail which the market
bounds.

There was less apparently to satisfy her here,
and she soon came back to the region she had
just left, seeming to find a pleasure now in
gratifying her sense of touch, as she had
formerly that of sight, by feeling the walls with
her fingers, suffering her hands to drag against
them as she walked along, and touching the ironwork
of the small but massive doors which were,
as has been said, on the Old Bailey side of the
prison.

She reached in this way the extreme southern
limit of the building, where the thoroughfare in
which it stands begins to narrow, and here she
stood for a while feeling the stones with her
hands, and actually, as it were, caressing them
with a sort of unnatural fondness. It was a
strange sight to see this woman hanging thus
about the place, and she was not unobserved by
the policemen about the prison. But they were
used to queer things happening there, and knew
that when some young fellow new to the ways
of crime got into "trouble," and came to be
confined in Newgate, it was no very unusual thing
for his mother or his "young woman" to come
and haunt the place where the son or the lover,
as the case might be, was going through his
novitiate of jail life. So they took no notice
of Jane Cantanker, for it was she, and left her
free to follow her own devices, and bestow all
the blandishments she felt inclined upon the
Newgate stonemasonry.

She had wandered down to this place to see
and judge of, with her own senses, the strength
of this prison in which the murderess of her
dear mistress was kept secure, and now as she
estimated its mighty proportions, and touched
its massive stones, she positively seemed to love
it, as she gloated over its prodigious power of
retention.

"Ah," she said, her triumph at last finding
vent in words, and addressing the very stones
of the prison wall, "you're rough and you're
strong, you are, and you're piled up one upon
another, and fixed together with stiff cement,
and there are more of you inside as hard and as
rough as these, and when one wall's passed,
there's another ready beyond it, and all the
doors are barred with iron, and set like these
with iron nails, and you've kept in strong men
before now, and men that were used to picking
locks and forcing bolts, and surely you'll be able
to keep a woman safe, a woman with soft white
hands, that aren't too white, though, or too soft
to commit a murder with, and mix the poison
that killed my poor dear lady."

She looked up again at the great square
stones, smoke-blackened and weather-hardened.

"I never thought," she said, "to have had