“Where are his worshippers and his hospitable friends?” whispers another.

“There’s not much hospitality for poverty,” rejoins a third, mutteringly.  “Southern hospitality is unsound, shallow, and flimsy; a little dazzling of observances to cover very bad facts.  You are sure to find a people who maintain the grossest errors in their political system laying the greatest claims to benevolence and principle-things to which they never had a right.  The phantom of hospitality draws the curtain over many a vice-it is a well-told nothingness ornamenting the beggared system of your slavery; that’s my honest opinion,” says a third, in a gruff voice, which indicates that he has no very choice opinion of such generosity.  “If they want a specimen of true hospitality, they must go to New England; there the poor man’s offering stocks the garden of liberty, happiness, and justice; and from them spring the living good of all,” he concludes; and folding his arms with an air of independence, walks up the long passage running at right angles with the entrance portal, and disappears in a cell on the left.

“I knew him when he was great on the turf.  He was very distinguished then.”  “He’ll be extinguished here,” insinuates another, as he protrudes his eager face over the shoulders of those who are again crowding round the office-door, Marston and the officer having entered following the gaoler.

The sheriff passes the committimus to the man of keys; that functionary takes his seat at a small desk, while Marston stands by its side, watching the process of his prison reception, in silence.  The gaoler reads the commitment, draws a book deliberately from off a side window, spreads it open on his desk, and commences humming an air.  “Pootty smart sums, eh!” he says, looking up at the sheriff, as he holds a quill in his left hand, and feels with the fingers of his right for a knife, which, he observes, he always keeps in his right vest pocket.  “We have a poor debtor’s calendar for registering these things.  I do these things different from other gaolers, and it loses me nothin’.  I goes on the true principle, that ’tant right to put criminals and debtors together; and if the state hasn’t made provision for keeping them in different cells, I makes a difference on the books, and that’s somethin’.  Helps the feelins over the smarting point,” says the benevolent keeper of all such troublesome persons as won’t pay their debts;—­as if the monstrous concentration of his amiability, in keeping separate books for the criminal and poverty-stricken gentlemen of his establishment, must be duly appreciated.  Marston, particularly, is requested to take the initiative, he being the most aristocratic fish the gaoler has caught in a long time.  But the man has made his pen, and now he registers Marston’s name among the state’s forlorn gentlemen, commonly called poor debtors.  They always confess themselves in dependent circumstances.  Endorsing the commitment, he returns it to the sheriff,