in feeling; two rows of wooden pillars, spaced at intervals of fifteen
feet, rose to a vaulted ceiling 25 or 30 feet above the floor. As you
stood with your back to the door, and faced down the room, you had in the
near right-hand corner (where the brooms stood) six pails of urine. On
the right-hand long wall, a little beyond the angle of this corner, a few
boards, tacked together in any fashion to make a two-sided screen four
feet in height, marked the position of a _cabinet d'aisance_, composed of
a small coverless tin pail identical with the other six, and a board of
the usual design which could be placed on the pail or not as desired. The
wooden floor in the neighborhood of the booth and pails was of a dark
colour, obviously owing to the continual overflow of their contents.

The right-hand long wall contained something like ten large windows, of
which the first was commanded by the somewhat primitive cabinet. There
were no other windows in the remaining walls; or they had been carefully
rendered useless. In spite of this fact, the inhabitants had contrived a
couple of peep-holes--one in the door-end and one in the left-hand long
wall; the former commanding the gate by which I had entered, the latter a
portion of the street by which I had reached the gate. The blocking of
all windows on three sides had an obvious significance: _les hommes_ were
not supposed to see anything which went on in the world without; _les
hommes_ might, however, look their fill on a little washing-shed, on a
corner of what seemed to be another wing of the building, and on a bleak
lifeless abject landscape of scrubby woods beyond--which constituted the
view from the ten windows on the right. The authorities had miscalculated
a little in one respect: a merest fraction of the barb-wire pen which
began at the corner of the above-mentioned building was visible from
these windows, which windows (I was told) were consequently thronged by
fighting men at the time of the girl's promenade. A _planton_, I was also
told, made it his business, by keeping _les femmes_ out of this corner of