and when it is to be liquidated and ended, rests with the Supreme
Destinies.

Several months ago, some friends took me with them to see one of
the London Prisons; a Prison of the exemplary or model kind. An
immense circuit of buildings; cut out, girt with a high
ring-wall, from the lanes and streets of the quarter, which is a
dim and crowded one. Gateway as to a fortified place; then a
spacious court, like the square of a city; broad staircases,
passages to interior courts; fronts of stately architecture all
round. It lodges some thousand or twelve hundred prisoners,
besides the officers of the establishment. Surely one of the
most perfect buildings, within the compass of London. We looked
at the apartments, sleeping-cells, dining-rooms, working-rooms,
general courts or special and private: excellent all, the
ne-plus-ultra of human care and ingenuity; in my life I never saw
so clean a building; probably no Duke in England lives in a
mansion of such perfect and thorough cleanness.

The bread, the cocoa, soup, meat, all the various sorts of food,
in their respective cooking-places, we tasted: found them of
excellence superlative. The prisoners sat at work, light work,
picking oakum, and the like, in airy apartments with glass roofs,
of agreeable temperature and perfect ventilation; silent, or at
least conversing only by secret signs: others were out, taking
their hour of promenade in clean flagged courts: methodic
composure, cleanliness, peace, substantial wholesome comfort
reigned everywhere supreme. The women in other apartments, some
notable murderesses among them, all in the like state of methodic
composure and substantial wholesome comfort, sat sewing: in long