The Hall of the Lost Footsteps at Versailles is but an empty name, but the millions of footsteps that have worn Newgate stones, must make it an abiding reality. Here have united all the crooked roads. Here have fallen the last steps on the stones of the ford of the Black River. Beyond the steps has loomed the City of Dis.
How many footsteps! how many!
Lord George Gordon, after the riots and burnings of 1780, wrecked and crazy, totters feebly up Newgate steps to die in the prison which his murderous associates had attempted to burn. Desperate Thistlewood, fresh from the loft in Cato street, where his fellow conspirators were dragged—reeking from the murder of Smithers, whose ghost followed him to the gallows, is brought here heavily chained from the Tower Dungeon, in which the ministry with frantic fear had at first immured him.
He and his gang will leave Newgate no more save by the Debtor's Door, where the Man in the Mask—one of the few unsolved mysteries of the Nineteenth century—will do his horrible office upon them and hold up to the populace five severed heads, who at first shudder, but growing hardened by the dripping sight of blood, will cry as the clumsy butcher lets the last head fall—
"Hallo, butter-fingers!"
Down Newgate steps at dead of night, how many corpses of uncoffined wretches have been borne in sacks, to be dissected at Old Surgeon's Hall, over the narrow causeway which skirts the prison.
EXECUTION OF BARRETT.
The dread gaol keeps its secret better now. No grapnel hauls forth the dishonored carcass of the dead criminal for exposition at the Gemonian steps.
The place is doubly a Golgotha, and murder is buried on the spot where it has been slain.