He
found the person he sought absent from home, and was equally unfortunate
in one or two other calls which he made upon acquaintances whom he hoped
to interest in her story. But everybody was, for the moment, stark-mad on
the subject of Porteous, and engaged busily in attacking or defending the
measures of Government in reprieving him; and the ardour of dispute had
excited such universal thirst, that half the young lawyers and writers,
together with their very clerks, the class whom Butler was looking after,
had adjourned the debate to some favourite tavern. It was computed by an
experienced arithmetician, that there was as much twopenny ale consumed
on the discussion as would have floated a first-rate man-of-war.
Butler wandered about until it was dusk, resolving to take that
opportunity of visiting the unfortunate young woman, when his doing so
might be least observed; for he had his own reasons for avoiding the
remarks of Mrs. Saddletree, whose shop-door opened at no great distance
from that of the jail, though on the opposite or south side of the
street, and a little higher up. He passed, therefore, through the narrow
and partly covered passage leading from the north-west end of the
Parliament Square.
He stood now before the Gothic entrance of the ancient prison, which, as
is well known to all men, rears its ancient front in the very middle of
the High Street, forming, as it were, the termination to a huge pile of
buildings called the Luckenbooths, which, for some inconceivable reason,
our ancestors had jammed into the midst of the principal street of the
town, leaving for passage a narrow street on the north; and on the south,
into which the prison opens, a narrow crooked lane, winding betwixt the
high and sombre walls of the Tolbooth and the adjacent houses on the one
side, and the butresses and projections of the old Cathedral upon the
other.
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