In Jail with Charles Dickens

die before the prison, who had been concerned in the attack upon it; and one directly after in Bloomsbury Square. At nine o'clock a strong body of military marched into the street, and formed and lined a narrow passage into Holborn, which had been indifferently kept all night by constables. Through this another cart was brought (the one already mentioned had been employed in the construction of the scaffold), and wheeled up to the prison gate. These preparations made, the soldiers stood at ease; the officers lounged to and fro in the alley they had made, or talked together at the scaffold's foot; and the concourse which had been rapidly augmenting for some hours, and still received additions every minute, waited with an impatience which increased with every chime of St. Sepulchre's clock for twelve at noon.

"Up to this time they had been very quiet, comparatively silent, save when the arrival of some new party at a window, hitherto unoccupied, gave them something to look at or to talk of. But, as the h