stream of people--all
the busy sounds of traffic, resound in it from morn to midnight; but the
streets around are mean and close; poverty and debauchery lie festering
in the crowded alleys; want and misfortune are pent up in the narrow
prison; an air of gloom and dreariness seems, in my eyes at least, to
hang about the scene, and to impart to it a squalid and sickly hue.

'Many eyes, that have long since been closed in the grave, have looked
round upon that scene lightly enough, when entering the gate of the old
Marshalsea Prison for the first time; for despair seldom comes with
the first severe shock of misfortune. A man has confidence in untried
friends, he remembers the many offers of service so freely made by his
boon companions when he wanted them not; he has hope--the hope of
happy inexperience--and however he may bend beneath the first shock, it
springs up in his bosom, and flourishes there for a brief space, until
it droops beneath the blight of disappointment and neglect. How soon
have those same eyes, deeply sunken in the head, glared from faces
wasted with famine, and sallow from confinement, in days when it was no
figure of speech to say that debtors rotted in prison, with no hope of
release, and no prospect of liberty! The atrocity in its full extent
no longer exists, but there is enough of it left to give rise to
occurrences that make the heart bleed.

'Twenty years ago, that pavement was worn with the footsteps of a mother
and child, who, day by day, so surely as the morning came, presented
themselves at the prison gate; often after a night of restless misery
and anxious thoughts, were they there, a full hour too soon, and then
the young mother turning meekly away, would lead the child to the old
bridge, and raising him in her arms to show him the glistening water,
tinted with the light of the morning's sun, and stirring with all the
bustling preparations for business and pleasure that the river presented
at that early hour, endeavour to interest his thoughts in the objects
before him. But she would quickly set him down, and hiding her face in
her shawl, give vent to the tears that blinded her; for no expression
of interest or amusement lighted up his thin and sickly face. His
recollections were few enough, but they were all of one kind--all
connected with the poverty and misery of his parents. Hour after hour
had he sat on his mother's knee, and with childish sympathy watched the
tears that stole down