We were going to spend weary days and months among the refuse of society.

We were doomed to associate with the criminality which still curses civilisation, after eighteen centuries of the gospel of redemption.

Posterity would condemn our sentence as a crime, but meanwhile we were fated to suffer.
Rattle, rattle, rattle! How the wretched machine _did_ rattle! Even the roar of the streets we traversed was inaudible, quenched in the frightful din.

All I could do was to inspect the memorials of my predecessors in that box.

The sides were scrawled over with their names (or nicknames) and sentences.