If they will allow him, the polite official will unlock the grated door.  Stepping before Franconia, who, as the clanking of the locks grate on her ear, is seized with sensations she cannot describe, he inserts the heavy key.  She turns to Harry, her face pallid as marble, and lays her tremulous hand on his arm, as if to relieve the nervousness with which she is seized.  Click! click! sounds forth:  again the door creaks on its hinges, and they are in the confines of the prison.  A narrow vaulted arch, its stone walls moistened with pestilential malaria, leads into a small vestibule, on the right hand of which stretched a narrow aisle lined on both sides with cells.  Damp and pestiferous, a hollow gloominess seems to pervade the place, as if it were a pest-house for torturing the living.  Even the air breathes of disease,—­a stench, as of dead men buried in its vaults, darts its poison deep into the system.  It is this, coupled with the mind’s discontent, that commits its ravages upon the poor prisoner,—­that sends him pale and haggard to a soon-forgotten grave.

“Last door on the right,—­you know, mum,” says the official:  “boy will follow, lightly:  whist! whist!”

“I know, to my sorrow,” is her reply, delivered in a whisper.  Ah! her emotions are too tender for prison walls; they are yielding tears from the fountain of her very soul.

“He’s sick:  walk softly, and don’t think of the prisoners.  Knock at the door afore enterin’,” says a staid-looking warden, emerging from a small door on the left hand of the vestibule.

“Zist! zist!” returns the other, pointing with the forefinger of his right hand down the aisle, and, placing his left, gently, on Franconia’s shoulder, motioning her to move on.

Slowly, her handkerchief to her face, she obeys the sign, and is moving down the corridor, now encountering anxious eyes peering through the narrow grating of huge black doors.  And then a faint, dolorous sound strikes on their listening ears.  They pause for a moment,—­listen again!  It becomes clearer and clearer; and they advance with anxious curiosity.  “It’s Daddy Bob’s voice,” whispers Harry; “but how distant it sounds!

“Even that murmurs in his confinement,” returns Franconia.

“How, like a thing of life, it recalls the past-the past of happiness!” says Harry, as they reach the cell door, and, tremulously, hesitate for a few moments.

“Listen again!” continues Harry.  The sound having ceased a moment or two, again commences, and the word “There’s a place for old mas’r yet, And de Lord will see him dar,” are distinctly audible.  “How the old man battles for his good master!” returns Harry, as Franconia taps gently on the door.  The wooden trap over the grating is closed; bolts hang carelessly from their staples; and yet, though the door is secured with a hook on the inside, disease and death breathe their morbid fumes through the scarce perceptible crevices.