less countenance quickens at your footfall. Oh! could you but feel
the emotion that has touched that shrunken form which so despondingly
waits the coming of a messenger of mercy. That system of cruelty to
prisoners which so disgraced England during the last century, and which
for her name she would were erased from her history, we preserve here in
all its hideousness. The Governor knows nothing, and cares nothing about
the prison; the Attorney-General never darkens its doors; the public
scarce give a thought for those within its walls--and to one man, Mr.
Hardscrabble, is the fate of these wretched beings entrusted. And so
prone has become the appetite of man to speculate on the misfortunes of
his fellow-man, that this good man, as we shall call him, tortures thus
the miserable beings entrusted to his keeping, and makes it a means of
getting rich. Pardon, reader, this digression.

George, elated with the idea of setting Tom at liberty, found the young
theologian at the prison, and revealed to him the fact that he had got
the much-desired order. To the latter this seemed strange--not that such
a person as George could have succeeded in what he had tried in vain to
effect, but that there was a mystery about it. It is but justice to say
that the young theologian had for six months used every exertion in his
power, without avail, to procure an order of release. He had appealed to
the Attorney-General, who declared himself powerless, but referred him
to the Governor. The Governor could take no action in the premises, and
referred him to the Judge of the Sessions. The Judge of the Sessions
doubted his capacity to interfere, and advised a petition to the Clerk
of the Court. The Clerk of the Court, who invariably took it upon
himself to correct the judge's dictum, decided that the judge could not
interfere, the case being a committal by a Justice of the Peace, and not
having been before the sessions. And against these high
functionaries--the Governor, Attorney-General, Judge of the Sessions,
and Clerk of the Court, was Mr. Soloman and Mrs. Swiggs all-powerful.
There was, however, another power superior to all, and that we have
described in the previous chapter.

Accompanied by the brusque old jailer, George and the young theologian
make their way to the cell in which Tom is confined.

"Hallo! Tom," exclaims George, as he enters the cell, "boarding at the
expense of the State yet, eh?" Tom lay stretched on a blanket in one
cor