This time I saw my father behind those high red walls, once so mysterious and terrible to me.

Heriot made light of prisons for debt.
He insisted, for my consolation, that they had but a temporary dishonourable signification; very estimable gentlemen, as well as scamps, inhabited them, he said.

The impression produced by my visit--the feasting among ruined men who believed in good luck the more the lower they fell from it, and their fearful admiration of my imprisoned father--was as if I had drunk a stupefying liquor.

I was unable clearly to reflect on it.

Daily afterwards, until I released him, I made journeys to usurers to get a loan on the faith of the reversion of my mother's estate.