But as my mother had already lost so much money through my unfortunate luck, and as she had enough to do with her little pittance to keep my sisters at home; and as, on hearing of my condition, she would infallibly have sold her last gown to bring me aid, Mary and I agreed that we would not let her know what our real condition was—­bad enough!  Heaven knows, and sad and cheerless.  Old Lieutenant Smith had likewise nothing but his half-pay and his rheumatism; so we were, in fact, quite friendless.

That period of my life, and that horrible prison, seem to me like recollections of some fever.  What an awful place!—­not for the sadness, strangely enough, as I thought, but for the gaiety of it; for the long prison galleries were, I remember, full of life and a sort of grave bustle.  All day and all night doors were clapping to and fro; and you heard loud voices, oaths, footsteps, and laughter.  Next door to our room was one where a man sold gin, under the name of tape; and here, from morning till night, the people kept up a horrible revelry;—­and sang—­sad songs some of them:  but my dear little girl was, thank God! unable to understand the most part of their ribaldry.  She never used to go out till nightfall; and all day she sat working at a little store of caps and dresses for the expected stranger—­and not, she says to this day, unhappy.  But the confinement sickened her, who had been used to happy country air, and she grew daily paler and paler.

The Fives Court was opposite our window; and here I used, very unwillingly at first, but afterwards, I do confess, with much eagerness, to take a couple of hours’ daily sport.  Ah! it was a strange place.  There was an aristocracy there as elsewhere,—­amongst other gents, a son of my Lord Deuce-ace; and many of the men in the prison were as eager to walk with him, and talked of his family as knowingly, as if they were Bond Street bucks.  Poor Tidd, especially, was one of these.  Of all his fortune he had nothing left but a dressing-case and a flowered dressing-gown; and to these possessions he added a fine pair of moustaches, with which the poor creature strutted about; and though cursing his ill fortune, was, I do believe, as happy whenever his friends brought him a guinea, as he had been during his brief career as a gentleman on town.  I have seen sauntering dandies in watering-places ogling the women, watching eagerly for steamboats and stage-coaches as if their lives depended upon them, and strutting all day in jackets up and down the public walks.  Well, there are such fellows in prison:  quite as dandified and foolish, only a little more shabby—­dandies with dirty beards and holes at their elbows.

I did not go near what is called the poor side of the prison—­I dared not, that was the fact.  But our little stock of money was running low; and my heart sickened to think what might be my dear wife’s fate, and on what sort of a couch our child might be born.  But Heaven spared me that pang,—­Heaven, and my dear good friend, Gus Hoskins.