From the first I had no expectation of release.

I told Colonel Milman that Sir William Harcourt was merely a politician, who cared for nothing but keeping in office; and that unless our friends could threaten some Liberal seats, or seriously affect a division in the House of Commons, he would keep us in to please the bigots and the Tories.
Our "petition" to the Home Secretary being finished, we returned to our cells, where tea was served at six o'clock.

It consisted of gruel, or, in prison parlance, "skilly," and another little brown loaf.

The liquid portion of this repast was too suggestive of bill-stickers' paste to be tempting, so I made a second meal of bread and water.
The red-haired warder gave me a lesson in bed-making before he locked me up for the night.

Hammocks had been dispensed with in Holloway ever since Sir Richard Cross groaned in the travail of invention, and produced his masterpiece and monument--the plank bed.