y feelings too inevitably belonging to his
situation, seemed to guess at the character of my ruminations by the
change in my countenance, for he expressed some pity for my being 'in so
much trouble'; and it seemed to increase his respect for me that this
trouble should be directed to the case of a woman, for he appeared to
have a manly sense of the peculiar appeal made to the honour and
gallantry of man, by the mere general fact of the feebleness and the
dependence of woman. I looked at him more attentively in consequence of
the feeling tone in which he now spoke, and was surprised that I had not
more particularly noticed him before; he was a fine-looking, youngish
man, with a bold Robin-hood style of figure and appearance; and, morally
speaking, he was absolutely transfigured to my eyes by the effect worked
upon him for the moment, through the simple calling up of his better
nature. However, he recurred to his cautions about the peril in a legal
sense of tampering with the windows, bolts, and bars of the old decaying
prison; which, in fact, precisely according to the degree in which its
absolute power over its prisoners was annually growing less and less,
grew more and more jealous of its own reputation, and punished the
attempts to break loose with the more severity, in exact proportion as
they were the more tempting by the chances of success. I persisted in
disowning any schemes of the sort, and especially upon the ground of
their hopelessness. But this, on the other hand, was a ground that in
his inner thoughts he treated with scorn; and I could easily see that,
with a little skilful management of opportunity, I might, upon occasion,
draw from him all the secrets he knew as to the special points of
infirmity in this old ruinous building. For the present, and until it
should certainly appear that there was some use to be derived from this
species of knowledge, I forbore to raise superfluous suspicions by
availing myself further of his communicative disposition. Taking,
however, the precaution of securing his name, together with his
particular office and designation in the prison, I parted from him as if
to go home, but in fact to resume my sad roamings up and down the
precincts of the jail.

What made these precincts much larger than otherwise they would have
been, was the circumstance that, by a usage derived from older days,
both criminal prisoners and those who were prisoners for debt, equally
fell under the custo