atment of us with his treatment of
Mr. Edmund Yates. From the first I had no expectation of release. I told
Colonel Milman that Sir William Harcourt was merely a politician, who
cared for nothing but keeping in office; and that unless our friends
could threaten some Liberal seats, or seriously affect a division in
the House of Commons, he would keep us in to please the bigots and the
Tories.

Our "petition" to the Home Secretary being finished, we returned to our
cells, where tea was served at six o'clock. It consisted of gruel, or,
in prison parlance, "skilly," and another little brown loaf. The liquid
portion of this repast was too suggestive of bill-stickers' paste to be
tempting, so I made a second meal of bread and water.

The red-haired warder gave me a lesson in bed-making before he locked
me up for the night. Hammocks had been dispensed with in Holloway
ever since Sir Richard Cross groaned in the travail of invention, and
produced his masterpiece and monument--the plank bed. Yet so slow is the
official mind, that the rings still lingered in some of the cells.
The plank bed is constructed of three eight-inch deals, held together
laterally by transverse wooden bars, which serve to lift it two or three
inches from the floor. At the head there is a raised portion of flat
wood, slightly sloping, to serve as a bolster. For the first month (such
is Sir Richard Cross's brilliant idea) every prisoner, no matter what
his age or his offence, must sleep on this plank bed without a mattress,
unless the doctor sees a special reason for ordering him one. During the
second month he sleeps on the plank bed three nights a week, and during
the third month one night. Sleeps! The very word is a mockery. Scores
of prisoners do _not_ sleep, but pass night after night in broken and
restless slumber. Fancy a man delicately brought up, as some prisoners
are, suddenly pitched on one of these vile inventions. He tosses about
hour after hour, and rises in the morning sore and weary. He has no
appetite for breakfast, and is low all day. The next night comes with
renewed torture, and on the following day he is still worse. He then
applies to see the doctor, who gives him a bottle of physic, which
forces an appetite for a while. But it is soon powerless against the
effects of nervous exhaustion, and before the poor devil can obtain
relief, he is sometimes reduced to the most pitiable condition. I
have seen robust men in Holloway, by means of