rket I
had brought my pigs to!

Chapel was over (I had come down too late from the "Reception" to attend
it); and the congregation (a lamentably small one) dispersed in the yard
and wards. I entered my own ward, to change (if any thing could change)
the dreary scene.

Smoking and cooking appeared to be the chief employments and recreations
of the prisoners. An insolvent clergyman in rusty black, was gravely
rolling out puff-paste on a pie-board; and a man in his shirt-sleeves,
covering a veal cutlet with egg and bread-crum, was an officer of
dragoons!

I found no lack of persons willing to enter into conversation with me. I
talked, full twenty minutes, with a seedy captive, with a white head, and
a coat buttoned and pinned up to the chin.

Whitecross-street, he told me (or Burdon's Hotel, as in the prison slang
he called it), was the only place where any "life" was to be seen. The
Fleet was pulled down; the Marshalsea had gone the way of all
brick-and-mortar; the Queen's Prison, the old "Bench," was managed on a
strict system of classification and general discipline; and
Horsemonger-lane was but rarely tenanted by debtors; but in favored
Whitecross-street, the good old features of imprisonment for debt yet
flourished. Good dinners were still occasionally given; "fives" and
football were yet played; and, from time to time, obnoxious attorneys, or
importunate process-servers--"rats" as they were called--were pumped upon,
floured, and bonneted. Yet, even Whitecross-street, he said with a sigh,
was falling off. The Small Debts Act and those revolutionary County Courts
would be too many for it soon.

That tall, robust, bushy-whiskered man, (he said) in the magnificently
flowered dressing-gown, the crimson Turkish smoking cap, the velvet
slippers, and the ostentatiously displayed gold guard-chain, was a
"mace-man:" an individual who lived on his wits, and on the want of wit in
others. He had had many names, varying from Plantagenet and De Courcy, to
"Edmonston and Co.," or plain Smith or Johnson. He was a real gentleman
once upon a time--a very long time ago. Since then, he had done a little on
the turf, and a great deal in French hazard, roulette, and _rouge et
noir_. He had cheated bill-discounters, and discounted bills himself. He
had been a picture-dealer, and a wine-merchant, and one of those
mysterious individuals called a "commission agent." He had done a little
on the Stock Exchange, and a little billiard-markin