nobody to try that game.' He looked with an air so significant, and at
the same time used a gesture so indicative of private understanding,
that I at once apprehended his meaning, and assured him that he had
altogether misconstrued my drift; that, as to attempts at escape, or at
any mode of communicating with the prisoner from the outside, I trusted
all _that_ was perfectly needless; and that at any rate in my eyes
it was perfectly hopeless. 'Well, master,' he replied, 'that's neither
here nor there. You've come down handsomely, that I _will_ say;
and where a gentleman acts like a gentleman, and behaves himself as
such, I'm not the man to go and split upon him for a word. To be sure
it's quite nat'ral that a gentleman--put case that a young woman is his
fancy woman--it's nothing but nat'ral that he should want to get her
out of such an old rat-hole as this, where many's the fine-timbered
creature, both he and she, that has lain to rot, and has never got out
of the old trap at all, first or last'----'How so?' I interrupted him;
'surely they don't detain the corpses of prisoners?' 'Ay, but mind you
--put case that he or that she should die in this rat-trap before
sentence is past, why then the prison counts them as its own children,
and buries them in its own chapel--that old stack of pigeon-holes that
you see up yonder to the right hand.' So then, after all, thought I, if
my poor Agnes should, in her desolation and solitary confinement to
these wretched walls, find her frail strength give way--should the
moral horrors of her situation work their natural effect upon her
health, and she should chance to die within this dungeon, here within
this same dungeon will she lie to the resurrection, and in that case
her prison-doors have already closed upon her for ever. The man, who
perhaps had some rough kindness in his nature, though tainted by the
mercenary feelings too inevitably belonging to his situation, seemed to
guess at the character of my ruminations by the change of my
countenance, for he expressed some pity for my being 'in so much