, philosopher, and friend. Our venerable
instructor was a great deal older, and not improved in appearance. His face was
as fiery as ever; his eyes were as small, and rather deeper set. The scanty,
wet-looking grey hair, by which I remembered him, was almost gone; and the thick
veins in his bald head were none the more agreeable to look at.
    After some conversation among these gentlemen, from which I might have
supposed that there was nothing in the world to be legitimately taken into
account but the supreme comfort of prisoners, at any expense, and nothing on the
wide earth to be done outside prison-doors, we began our inspection. It being
then just dinner-time, we went, first into the great kitchen, where every
prisoner's dinner was in course of being set out separately (to be handed to him
in his cell), with the regularity and precision of clock-work. I said aside, to
Traddles, that I wondered whether it occurred to anybody, that there was a
striking contrast between these plentiful repasts of choice quality, and the
dinners, not to say of paupers, but of soldiers, sailors, labourers, the great
bulk of the honest, working community; of whom not one man in five hundred ever
dined half so well. But I learned that the system required high living; and, in
short, to dispose of the system, once for all, I found that on that head and on
all others, the system put an end to all doubts, and disposed of all anomalies.
Nobody appeared to have the least idea that there was any other system, but the
system, to be considered.
    As we were going through some of the magnificent passages, I inquired of Mr.
Creakle and his friends what were supposed to be the main advantages of this
all-governing and universally over-riding system? I found them to be the perfect
isolation of prisoners - so that no one man in confinement there, knew anything
about another; and the reduction of prisoners to a wholesome state of mind,
leading to sincere contrition and repentance.
    Now, it struck me, when we began to visit individuals in their cells, and to
traverse the passages in which those cells were, and to have the manner of the
going to chapel and so forth, explained to us, that there was a strong
probability of the prisoners knowing a good deal about each other, and of their
carrying on a pretty complete system of intercourse. This, at the time I write,
has been proved, I
