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them, and entered them into the jail book as convicts. Having passed
through the office, each of them was conducted along a gallery shrouded
in darkness, through a long damp vault to a narrow door which was
suddenly opened. This reached, a jailer pushed the Representative in by
the shoulders, and the door was shut.
The Representative, thus immured, found himself in a little, long,
narrow, dark room. It is this which the prudent language of modern
legislation terms a "cell." Here the full daylight of a December noon
only produced a dusky twilight. At one end there was a door, with a
little grating; at the other, close to the ceiling, at a height of ten or
twelve feet, there was a loophole with a fluted glass window. This window
dimmed the eye, and prevented it from seeing the blue or gray of the sky,
or from distinguishing the cloud from the sun's ray, and invested the wan
daylight of winter with an indescribable uncertainty. It was even less
than a dim light, it was a turbid light. The inventors of this fluted
window succeeded in making the heavens squint.
After a few moments the prisoner began to distinguish objects confusedly,
and this is what he found: White-washed walls here and there turned green
by various exhalations; in one corner a round hole guarded by iron bars,
and exhaling a disgusting smell; in another corner a slab turning upon a
hinge like the bracket seat of a fiacre, and thus capable of being used
as a table; no bed; a straw-bottomed chair; under foot a brick floor.
Gloom was the first impression; cold was the second. There, then, the
prisoner found himself, alone, chilled, in this semi-darkness, being able
to walk up and down the space of eight square feet like a caged wolf, or
to remain seated on his chair like an idiot at Bicêtre.
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