It was a large prison with many courts and passages so like one another and so uniformly paved that I seemed to gain a new comprehension, as I passed along, of the fondness that solitary prisoners, shut up among the same staring walls from year to year, have had—­as I have read—­for a weed or a stray blade of grass.  In an arched room by himself, like a cellar upstairs, with walls so glaringly white that they made the massive iron window-bars and iron-bound door even more profoundly black than they were, we found the trooper standing in a corner.  He had been sitting on a bench there and had risen when he heard the locks and bolts turn.

When he saw us, he came forward a step with his usual heavy tread, and there stopped and made a slight bow.  But as I still advanced, putting out my hand to him, he understood us in a moment.

“This is a load off my mind, I do assure you, miss and gentlemen,” said he, saluting us with great heartiness and drawing a long breath.  “And now I don’t so much care how it ends.”

He scarcely seemed to be the prisoner.  What with his coolness and his soldierly bearing, he looked far more like the prison guard.

“This is even a rougher place than my gallery to receive a lady in,” said Mr. George, “but I know Miss Summerson will make the best of it.”  As he handed me to the bench on which he had been sitting, I sat down, which seemed to give him great satisfaction.

“I thank you, miss,” said he.

“Now, George,” observed my guardian, “as we require no new assurances on your part, so I believe we need give you none on ours.”

“Not at all, sir.  I thank you with all my heart.  If I was not innocent of this crime, I couldn’t look at you and keep my secret to myself under the condescension of the present visit.  I feel the present visit very much.  I am not one of the eloquent sort, but I feel it, Miss Summerson and gentlemen, deeply.”

He laid his hand for a moment on his broad chest and bent his head to us.  Although he squared himself again directly, he expressed a great amount of natural emotion by these simple means.

“First,” said my guardian, “can we do anything for your personal comfort, George?”

“For which, sir?” he inquired, clearing his throat.

“For your personal comfort.  Is there anything you want that would lessen the hardship of this confinement?”

“Well, sir,” replied George, after a little cogitation, “I am equally obliged to you, but tobacco being against the rules, I can’t say that there is.”

“You will think of many little things perhaps, by and by.  Whenever you do, George, let us know.”

“Thank you, sir.  Howsoever,” observed Mr. George with one of his sunburnt smiles, “a man who has been knocking about the world in a vagabond kind of a way as long as I have gets on well enough in a place like the present, so far as that goes.”

“Next, as to your case,” observed my guardian.