I found the Dormitory below the School:
with its bare walls and rafters, and bare floor,
the building looked rather like an extensive
coach-house, well lighted with gas. A wooden
gallery had been recently erected on three
sides of it; and, abutting from the centre of
the wall on the fourth side, was a kind of
glazed meat-safe, accessible by a ladder; in
which the presiding officer is posted every
night, and all night. In the centre of the
room, which was very cool, and perfectly
sweet, stood a small fixed stove; on two sides,
there were windows; on all sides, simple
means of admitting fresh air, and releasing
foul air. The ventilation of the place, devised
by DOCTOR ARNOTT, and particularly the
expedient for relieving the sleepers in the
galleries from receiving the breath of the
sleepers below, is a wonder of simplicity,
cheapness, efficiency, and practical good sense.
If it had cost five or ten thousand pounds,
it would have been famous.

The whole floor of the building, with the
exception of a few narrow pathways, was
partitioned off into wooden troughs, or shallow
boxes without lids—not unlike the fittings in
the shop of a dealer in corn and flour,
and seeds. The galleries were parcelled out
in the same way. Some of these berths
were very short—for boys; some, longer—for
men. The largest were of very contracted
limits; all were composed of the bare boards;
each was furnished only with one coarse rug,
rolled up. In the brick pathways were iron
gratings communicating with trapped drains,
enabling the entire surface of these sleeping-places
to be soused and flooded with water
every morning. The floor of the galleries was
cased with zinc, and fitted with gutters and
escape-pipes, for the same reason. A supply
of water, both for drinking and for washing,
and some tin vessels for either purpose, were
at hand. A little shed, used by one of the
industrial classes, for the chopping up of
firewood, did not occupy the whole of the spare
space in that corner; and the remainder was
devoted to some excellent baths, available also
as washing troughs, in order that those who
have any rags of linen may clean them once
a-week. In aid of this object, a drying-closet,
charged with hot-air, was about to be erected
in the wood-chopping shed. All these appliances
were constructed in the simplest manner,
with the commonest means, in the narrowest
space, at the lowest cost; but were perfectly
adapted to their respective purposes.

I had scarcely made the round of the
Dormitory, and looked at all these things, when
a moving of feet overhead announced that the
School was breaking up for the night. It was
succeeded by profound silence, and then by
a hymn, sung in a subdued tone, and in very
good time and tune, by the learners we had
lately seen. Separated from their miserable
bodies, the effect of their voices, united in
this strain, was infinitely solemn. It was as if
their souls were singing—as if the outward
differences that parted us had fallen away,
and the time was come when all the perverted
good that was in them, or that ever might have
been in them, arose imploringly to Heaven.

The baker who had brought the bread, and
who leaned against a pillar while the singing
was in progress, meditating in his way, whatever
his way was, now shouldered his basket
and retired. The two half-starved attendants
(rewarded with a double portion for their
pains) heaped the six-ounce loaves into other
baskets, and made ready to distribute them.
The night-officer arrived, mounted to his
meat-safe, unlocked it, hung up his hat, and
prepared to spend the evening. I found him
to be a very respectable-looking person in
black, with a wife and family; engaged in an
office all day, and passing his spare time here,
from half-past nine every night to six every
morning, for a pound a-week. He had carried
the post against two hundred competitors.

The door was now opened, and the men
and boys who were to pass that night in the
Dormitory, in number one hundred and
sixty-seven (including a man for whom there was
no trough, but who was allowed to rest in
the seat by the stove, once occupied by the
night-officer before the meat-safe was), came
in. They passed to their different sleeping-places,
quietly and in good order. Every one
sat down in his own crib, where he became
presented in a curiously foreshortened manner;
and those who had shoes took them off, and
placed them in the adjoining path. There
were, in the assembly, thieves, cadgers,
trampers, vagrants, common outcasts of all
sorts. In casual wards and many other
Refuges, they would have been very difficult
to deal with; but they were restrained here
by the law of kindness, and had long since
arrived at the knowledge that those who
gave them that shelter could have no possible
inducement save to do them good. Neighbours
spoke little together—they were almost
as uncompanionable as mad people—  but
everybody took his small loaf when the
baskets went round, with a thankfulness more
or less cheerful, and immediately ate it up.

There was some excitement in consequence
of one man being missing; "the lame old
man." Everybody had seen the lame old
man up-stairs asleep, but he had unaccountably
disappeared. What he had been doing
with himself was a mystery, but, when the
inquiry was at its height, he came shuffling
and tumbling in, with his palsied head hanging
on his breast—an emaciated drunkard, once
a compositor, dying of starvation and decay.
He was so near death, that he could not be
kept there, lest he should die in the night;
and, while it was under deliberation what to
do with him, and while his dull lips tried to
shape out answers to what was said to him,
he was held up by two men. Beside this
wreck, but all unconnected with it and with
the whole world, was an orphan boy with
burning cheeks and great gaunt eager eyes,