Walking north in the vain search for work, my correspondent crossed to Lancashire and encountered the following experience.
"I was admitted at 8.10. They gave me coffee and bread, and sent me to a very nice large and well-ventilated room, a room large enough to sleep fifteen men in easily. There were three others there, and after waiting till nine o'clock, during which time nine more arrived, they started bathing us. There are four baths there, three for each bath, and how many more after used the same water I do not know. Given a shirt, you are sent to the cells. I noticed on going to mine that there were eleven cells on the right, and nine on the left. My cell was four from the top on the left. The right side was full, and the three on the left above mine also full. I noticed three pairs of boots outside each cell; a pleasant prospect. There were two men already in my cell. I made the third. That made forty-five men for the fifteen cells, then there were the eleven men I left in the bath-room, who would fill four others, that would make fifty-six men in nineteen cells. Now when I tell you that these cells are four feet six inches wide, and my two comrades were bigger men than me, and I am not a small one, you can fancy the situation. What I suffered from cramp alone was punishment enough for a lifetime. You have one rug each, not enough to keep you from coming in contact with the other men's flesh. As soon as you are in the door is closed and you are in black darkness, yet the gas is burning in the passage all night. I could see it by the crack in the door, and if they would cut a hole in the door it would serve both for ventilation and light.
"I can safely say that I had never such a night in my life. Sleep was out of the question, even if you had not been disturbed by the groans and curses that were going on more or less all night, a sort of song you would fancy they sing in the Inferno.
"One of my mates was an old man. He had been drinking. Some one had given him a couple of pints of 1-1/2_d_. beer, and I suppose he had had an empty stomach, anyway he said it upset him. 'Diarrhoea,' he called it. Now the foul air arising from other causes was bad enough, but when I tell you."... Here follows a description of consequences. "The old man said it was useless to call to the attendant, he had been in before." When at 5.30 the door was opened it was only to fetch rugs and shirts. Permission to leave the cell or empty the vessel was refused by two attendants, and also to men in other cells. "It's a mercy I did not go off my head," my correspondent remarks concerning that horrible night.