In the cell close by sat a child’s murderess.  I saw her only through the little glass in the door.  She had had heard our footsteps; heard us speak; but she sat still, squeezed up into the corner by the door, as if she would hide herself as much as possible:  her back was bent, her head almost on a level with her lap, and her hands folded over it.  They said this unfortunate creature was very young.  Two brothers sat here in two different cells:  they were punished for horse stealing; the one was still quite a boy.

In one cell was a poor servant girl.  They said:  “She has no place of resort, and without a situation, and therefore she is placed here.”  I thought I had not heard rightly, and repeated my question, “why she was here,” but got the same answer.  Still I would rather believe that I had misunderstood what was said—­it would otherwise be abominable.

Outside, in the free sunshine, it is the busy day; in here it is always midnight’s stillness.  The spider that weaves its web down the wall, the swallow which perhaps flies a single time close under the panes there high up in the wall—­even the stranger’s footstep in the gallery, as he passes the cell-doors, is an event in that mute, solitary life, where the prisoners’ thoughts are wrapped up in themselves.  One must read of the martyr-filled prisons of the Inquisition, of the crowds chained together in the Bagnes, of the hot, lead chambers of Venice, and the black, wet gulf of the wells—­be thoroughly shaken by these pictures of misery, that we may with a quieter pulsation of the heart wander through the gallery of the prison-cells.  Here is light, here is air;—­here it is more humane.  Where the sunbeam shines mildly in on the prisoner, there also will the radiance of God shine into the heart.

BEGGAR-BOYS.

* * * * *

The painter Callot—­who does not know the name, at least from Hoffmann’s “in Callot’s manner?”—­has given a few excellent pictures of Italian beggars.  One of these is a fellow, on whom the one rag lashes the other:  he carries his huge bundle and a large flag with the inscription, “Capitano de Baroni.”  One does not think that there can in reality be found such a wandering rag-shop, and we confess that in Italy itself we have not seen any such; for the beggar-boy there, whose whole clothing often consists only of a waistcoat, has in it not sufficient costume for such rags.

But we see it in the North.  By the canal road between the Venern and Vigen, on the bare, dry rocky plain there stood, like beauty’s thistles in that poor landscape, a couple of beggar-boys, so ragged, so tattered, so picturesquely dirty, that we thought we had Callot’s originals before us, or that it was an arrangement of some industrious parents, who would awaken the traveller’s attention and benevolence.  Nature does not form such things:  there was something so bold in the hanging on of the rags, that each boy instantly became a Capitano de Baroni.