Penny Blood Serial Cover — page 48: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

40 ALFRED DE ROSANNs, CHAPTER IV. THE CONVICTS. Ir was on the twenty-seventh. of April, 1830, in the reign of the good King Charles the Tenth, that a number of convicts left the walls of Bicétre, under a strong escort of Gendarmes, to be conducted to Brest. The rays of the rising sun had scarcely changed the dubious twilight into a certain dawn—a cold breeze swept around the gloomy towers of the prison, which the criminals were nevertheless averse to quit—and the threatening appearance of the heavens seemed to give noticeof an impending storm. Theclanking of the martial weapons of the mounted police—the haggard faces and shivering forms of the malefactors—the rat- tling of their chains—the frowning pyramid of build- ings whence those unhappy beings had ere now is- sued—and the dreariness of the weather, all combined to strike terror to the hearts of two individuals, who stood at a short distance from the cavalcade, and gazed upon the procession with more than common curiosity pictured in their anxious countenances. The chain of galley-slaves,* as it is called in France, was composed of about fifty or sixty men. The moment the doors of Bicétre were thrown open, they had issued forth two at a time, such being the manner in which they were fettered together—and paired off to their respective situations in the inglori- ous rank. Eighteen or twenty Gendarmes, bearing loaded carabines at their backs and pistols in their holsters attached to their saddles, guarded the prison- ers with most scrupulous care, and offered an addi- * La chaine des galeriens: we shall henceforth, with the per- ' mission of the courteous reader, anglicise this expression. — Gomicbdooks co