The day drew on, and the soft sweet air of evening began to rise. They had stopped here and there for refreshments, but Richard had taken nothing; he had, however, always accompanied his custodians within doors at the various halting-places. He was afraid of the crowd that might gather about the vehicle to look at the man that was being taken to prison. There was nothing to mark him as such, but it seemed to him that nobody could fail to know it. He welcomed the approach of night. They still traveled on for hours, since there was no House of Detention at which he could be placed in safety on the road; at last the wheels rumbled over the uneven stones of a little country town; they stopped before a building similar, so far as he could see by the moonlight, to that to which he had been taken at Plymouth: all jails are alike, especially to the eyes of the prisoner. A great bell was rung; there was a parley with the keeper of the gate. The whole scene resembled something which Richard remembered to have read in a book; he knew not what, nor where. A door in the wall was opened; they led him up some stone steps; the door closed behind him with a clang; and its locks seemed to bite into the stone.
"This way, prisoner," said a gruff voice.
Door after door, passage after passage; a labyrinth of stone and iron. At last he was ushered into a small chamber, unlike any thing he had ever seen in his life. His sleeping-room at the keeper's lodge at Crompton was palatial compared with it. The walls were stone; the floor of a shining brown, so that it looked wet, though it was not so. His jailer-chamberlain pointed to a low-lying hammock, stretched upon two straps between the walls. "There, tumble in," he said; "you will have your bath in the morning. Look alive!"
Richard obeyed him at once. "Good-night, warder," said he.
"Night!" grumbled the other; "it's morn-in'. A pretty time to be knockin' up people at a respectable establishment. If you want any thin'--broiled bones, or deviled kidneys"--for the man was a wag in his quaint way--"ring this 'ere bell. As for the other rules and regulations of her Majesty's jail, you'll learn them at breakfast-time."
How the doors _did_ slam in that place! And Richard was left alone. If, instead of the metal ewer of water that stood by his bed-head, there had been a glass of deadliest poison, he would have seized it greedily, and emptied it to the dregs.