Reading, being set deep in a valley at the confluence of two rivers, is an unhealthy town, close and sultry by summer, and damp and misty by winter. The gaol is a handsome building, erected in red brick after the manner of an old castle, with battlements and towers. One almost expected a portcullis to be lowered at the great gate; and when we were within the double gates we certainly felt as though a portcullis had been drawn after us. We stood in a small cobbled yard. Behind us was the broad wall in which the double gates were set, flanked on each side by the Governor’s and the Steward’s houses. Before us a flight of stone steps arose, leading to the offices, behind which was the large male prison. To the right a wall arose dividing us from the work yard; and on the left a high blind wall arose, pierced only by a single door near the wall round the jail. This was the female prison—ordinarily so, but for the time being our habitation.

[108]

Yet what astonished me most was the sight of flowers. Their presence made the cobbled yard and the precincts seem almost collegiate. In neatly kept beds about the walls they lifted their heads with a happy gaiety very strange to some of us who had known so human a touch banished from buildings more appropriately given over to the possession of flints and cinders. A few days after we were taken through the work yard behind the main prison. Here in the work hall a canteen was opened on three days in the week for the interned prisoners who now occupied the prison, but here also was the large exercise yard, and it was covered with an abundance of flowers. The familiar asphalt paths could not be seen where they threaded their way amid blossoms. In beds beneath the walls tall flowers lifted their heads, and even the graves of hanged men could not be seen beneath the blooms that covered them.

It was an amazing sight. There were not merely flowers, a sight astonishing enough in itself; there was a prodigality of flowers. Then some of us remembered the cause. One of the graves unlocked the secret. It was marked with the letters C. T. W., and the date, 1896, to whom Oscar Wilde’s “Ballad of Reading [109]Jail” had been inscribed, and in celebration of whose passing the poem had been penned.
But neither milk-white rose nor red
May bloom in prison-air;
Th............