only by secret
signs: others were out, taking their hour of promenade in clean flagged
courts: methodic composure, cleanliness, peace, substantial wholesome
comfort reigned everywhere supreme. The women in other apartments,
some notable murderesses among them, all in the like state of methodic
composure and substantial wholesome comfort, sat sewing: in long ranges
of wash-houses, drying-houses and whatever pertains to the getting-up
of clean linen, were certain others, with all conceivable mechanical
furtherances, not too arduously working. The notable murderesses were,
though with great precautions of privacy, pointed out to us; and we were
requested not to look openly at them, or seem to notice them at all,
as it was found to "cherish their vanity" when visitors looked at them.
Schools too were there; intelligent teachers of both sexes, studiously
instructing the still ignorant of these thieves.

From an inner upper room or gallery, we looked down into a range of
private courts, where certain Chartist Notabilities were undergoing
their term. Chartist Notability First struck me very much; I had seen
him about a year before, by involuntary accident and much to my disgust,
magnetizing a silly young person; and had noted well the unlovely
voracious look of him, his thick oily skin, his heavy dull-burning eyes,
his greedy mouth, the dusky potent insatiable animalism that looked
out of every feature of him: a fellow adequate to animal-magnetize most
things, I did suppose;--and here was the post I now found him arrived
at. Next neighbor to him was Notability Second, a philosophic or
literary Chartist; walking rapidly to and fro in his private court, a
clean, high-walled place; the world and its cares quite excluded, for
some months to come: master of his own time and spiritual resources to,
as I supposed, a really enviable extent. What "literary man" to an equal
extent! I fancied I, for my own part, so left with paper and ink, and
all taxes and botherations shut out from me, could have written such a
Book as no reader will here ever get of me. Never, O reader, never here
in a mere house with taxes and botherations. Here, alas, one has to
snatch one's poor Book, bit by bit, as from a conflagration; and to
think and live, comparatively, as if the house were not one's own, but
mainly the world's and the devil's. Notability Second might have filled
one with envy.

The Captain of the place, a gentleman of ancient Military or Roy