Читать книгу Twenty Years' Recollections of an Irish Police Magistrate - Frank Thorpe Porter - Страница 17

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Towards the close of the last century, a gaol for the city of Dublin was built, and its appearance had a great tendency to deter any person from incurring the liability of becoming an inmate. Its soot-begrimed walls and rusty portal completely falsified its designation of Newgate, and its front constituted a considerable portion of a locality, the aspect of which suggested no idea of verdure, although it was called Green Street. It was a place replete with fatal memories, very few of which are worthy of being evoked, and it has been completely taken down. The sons of the gentleman who was governor more than fifty years ago were my schoolmates, and my associations with them made me acquainted with some incidents which may be worthy of narration. When Oliver Bond was under sentence of death for treason; and whilst there was the strongest probability that the law would take its course, he was permitted, during the day-time, to occupy an upper apartment, the door of which was partly of glass. Mrs. Bond was as much with him as the rules of the prison allowed, and was sitting in the room on the day when Mr. Michael William Byrne was executed as a united Irishman. The fatal procession had to pass close by the door of Bond's apartment; and as it approached, Mr. Byrne remarked to the sheriff, that Mrs. Bond would be greatly shocked by seeing a person pass to that scaffold on which her husband expected to suffer. Mr. Byrne then suggested that they should stoop and creep noiselessly by the door, so as to escape her observation. His wish was complied with, and on reaching the drop, he turned to the sheriff, and remarked, with an air of great satisfaction, "we managed that extremely well." This spontaneous solicitude to spare the feelings of an afflicted female, will aptly class with that of the gallant Count Dillon, who was one of the earliest victims of the Reign of Terror in France, and who, when he arrived at the guillotine, was requested by a female fellow-sufferer, to precede her, upon which the preux chevalier saluted her with courtly grace, and stepped forward, saying, "anything to oblige a lady."

In one of the back yards of Newgate, to the right of the entrance, was the place of confinement for the condemned, the walls of which exhibited initials, sometimes entire names of unhappy occupants. One, who suffered the extreme penalty of the law nearly sixty years ago, for forging notes of the Bank of Ireland, pencilled the following lines on the door of his cell:—