‘When is that?’
‘Next month.’
‘In England, if a man be under sentence of death, even he has air and exercise at certain periods of the day.’
‘Possible?’
With what stupendous and untranslatable coolness he says this, and how loungingly he leads on to the women’s side: making, as he goes, a kind of iron castanet of the key and the stair-rail!
Each cell door on this side has a square aperture in it. Some of the women peep anxiously through it at the sound of footsteps; others shrink away in shame.—For what offence can that lonely child, of ten or twelve years old, be shut up here? Oh! that boy? He is the son of the prisoner we saw just now; is a witness against his father; and is detained here for safe keeping, until the trial; that’s all.
But it is a dreadful place for the child to pass the long days and nights in. This is rather hard treatment for a young witness, is it not?—What says our conductor?
‘Well, it an’t a very rowdy life, and that’s a fact!’
Again he clinks his metal castanet, and leads us leisurely away. I have a question to ask him as we go.
‘Pray, why do they call this place The Tombs?’