LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER VIII.

       Table of Contents

      Common Sense. What is the end of punishment as regards the individual punished?

      Custom. To make him better!

      Common Sense. How do you punish young offenders who are (from their youth) peculiarly alive to example, and whom it is therefore more easy either to ruin or reform than the matured?

      Custom. We send them to the House of Correction, to associate with the d—dest rascals in the country!

      Dialogue between Common Sense and Custom.—Very scarce.

      As it was rather late in the day when Paul made his first entree at Bridewell, he passed that night in the “receiving-room.” The next morning, as soon as he had been examined by the surgeon and clothed in the customary uniform, he was ushered, according to his classification, among the good company who had been considered guilty of that compendious offence, “a misdemeanour.” Here a tall gentleman marched up to him, and addressed him in a certain language, which might be called the freemasonry of flash, and which Paul, though he did not comprehend verbatim, rightly understood to be an inquiry whether he was a thorough rogue and an entire rascal. He answered half in confusion, half in anger; and his reply was so detrimental to any favourable influence he might otherwise have exercised over the interrogator, that the latter personage, giving him a pinch in the ear, shouted out, “Ramp, ramp!” and at that significant and awful word, Paul found himself surrounded in a trice by a whole host of ingenious tormentors. One pulled this member, another pinched that; one cuffed him before, and another thrashed him behind. By way of interlude to this pleasing occupation, they stripped him of the very few things that in his change of dress he had retained. One carried off his handkerchief, a second his neckcloth, and a third, luckier than either, possessed himself of a pair of carnelian shirt-buttons, given to Paul as a gage d'amour by a young lady who sold oranges near the Tower. Happily, before this initiatory process—technically termed “ramping,” and exercised upon all new-comers who seem to have a spark of decency in them—had reduced the bones of Paul, who fought tooth and nail in his defence, to the state of magnesia, a man of a grave aspect, who had hitherto plucked his oakum in quiet, suddenly rose, thrust himself between the victim and the assailants, and desired the latter, like one having authority, to leave the lad alone, and go and be d—d.

      This proposal to resort to another place for amusement, though uttered in a very grave and tranquil manner, produced that instantaneous effect which admonitions from great rogues generally work upon little. Messieurs the ravmpers ceased from their amusements; and the ringleader of the gang, thumping Paul heartily on the back, declared he was a capital fellow, and it was only a bit of a spree like, which he hoped had not given any offence.

      Paul, still clenching his fist, was about to answer in no pacific mood, when a turnkey, who did not care in the least how many men he locked up for an offence, but who did not at all like the trouble of looking after any one of his flock to see that the offence was not committed, now suddenly appeared among the set; and after scolding them for the excessive plague they were to him, carried off two of the poorest of the mob to solitary confinement. It happened, of course, that these two had not taken the smallest share in the disturbance. This scene over, the company returned to picking oakum; the tread-mill, that admirably just invention by which a strong man suffers no fatigue and a weak one loses his health for life, not having been then introduced into our excellent establishments for correcting crime. Bitterly and with many dark and wrathful feelings, in which the sense of injustice at punishment alone bore him up against the humiliations to which he was subjected—bitterly and with a swelling heart, in which the thoughts that lead to crime were already forcing their way through a soil suddenly warmed for their growth, did Paul bend over his employment. He felt himself touched on the arm; he turned, and saw that the gentleman who had so kindly delivered him from his tormentors was now sitting next to him. Paul gazed long and earnestly upon his neighbour, struggling with the thought that he had beheld that sagacious countenance in happier times, although now, alas! it was altered not only by time and vicissitudes but by that air of gravity which the cares of manhood spread gradually over the face of the most thoughtless—until all doubt melted away, and he exclaimed—

      “Is that you, Mr. Tomlinson? How glad I am to see you here!”

      “And I,” returned the quondam murderer for the newspapers, with a nasal twang, “should be very glad to see myself anywhere else.”

      Paul made no answer; and Augustus continued—

      “'To a wise man all places are the same,'—so it has been said. I don't believe it, Paul—I don't believe it. But a truce to reflection! I remembered you the moment I saw you, though you are surprisingly grown. How is my friend MacGrawler?—still hard at work for 'The Asinaeum'?”

      “I believe so,” said Paul, sullenly, and hastening to change the conversation; “but tell me, Mr. Tomlinson, how came you hither? I heard you had gone down to the North of England to fulfil a lucrative employment.”

      “Possibly! The world always misrepresents the actions of those who are constantly before it.”

      “It is very true,” said Paul; “and I have said the same thing myself a hundred times in 'The Asinaeum,' for we were never too lavish of our truths in that magnificent journal. 'T is astonishing what a way we made three ideas go.”

      “You remind me of myself and my newspaper labours,” rejoined Augustus Tomlinson. “I am not quite sure that I had so many as three ideas to spare; for, as you say, it is astonishing how far that number may go, properly managed. It is with writers as with strolling players—the same three ideas that did for Turks in one scene do for Highlanders in the next; but you must tell me your history one of these days, and you shall hear mine.”

      “I should be excessively obliged to you for your confidence,” said Paul, “and I doubt not but your life must be excessively entertaining. Mine, as yet, has been but insipid. The lives of literary men are not fraught with adventure; and I question whether every writer in 'The Asinaeum' has not led pretty nearly the same existence as that which I have sustained myself.”

      In conversation of this sort our newly restored friends passed the remainder of the day, until the hour of half-past four, when the prisoners are to suppose night has begun, and be locked up in their bedrooms. Tomlinson then, who was glad to re-find a person who had known him in his beaux jours, spoke privately to the turnkey; and the result of the conversation was the coupling Paul and Augustus

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