In the prison the walls were gleaming snowy white, but so they gleamed when the frost and snow sparkled a little whiter outside, when the hot breath of fiercest summer seemed to weigh down the air.
The symbols of the four seasons—the leafless trees, the tender, pale green trees, the drooping, heavily-laden, sheltering trees, the trees clothed in purple and gold—were unknown to those within the House of Correction.
The prisoners saw no trees from the high windows of their cells. When they walked out in that walled-in enclosure, each prisoner treading in those dreary circles five feet apart from his fellow, they saw a little withered grass, and a little sky, blue, grey, or cloudy, but no trees.
The trees are only for the free, not for men and women shut in for the punishment of their crimes.
So the seasons are felt in the temperature, but unknown to the sense of sight.
On this particular Sunday morning a warder might have been seen pacing slowly down the dismal corridor which divides the dark and light punishment cells.
He was whistling a low tune under his breath, and thinking how by and by he should be off duty, and could enjoy his Sunday dinner and go for a walk across the common with his wife and the child. He thought of his Sunday treat a great deal, as was but natural, and just a little of the prisoners, whom he apostrophised as “Poor Brutes.” Not that he felt unkindly towards them—very far from that; he was, as the world goes, a humane man, but it was incomprehensible to him how men and boys, when they were confined in Wandsworth, did not submit to the rules of the place, and make themselves as comfortable as circumstances would permit, instead of defying everything, and getting themselves shut up in those dreary dark cells.
“And this willan ’ave been in fur four days and nights now,” he soliloquised, as he stopped at the door of one. “Well, I’m real glad ’is punishment is hover, though ’ee’s as ’ardened a young chap as hever see daylight.”
He unlocked the double doors, which, when shut, not only excluded all sound, but every ray of light, and went in.
A lad was cowering up in one corner of the wooden bedstead—a lad with a blanched face, and eyes glowing like two coals. The warder went over and laid his hand on his shoulder—he started at the touch, and shivered from head to foot with either rage or fear.