And then there is the hospital--usually pretty full at this season, I regret to say.

Come, I won't detain you; but really in passing you must have a look at one of our dormitories." He threw open a door, and she gazed in upon a long-drawn avenue of iron pillars slung with double tiers of hammocks.

The place seemed clean enough: at the far end of the vista a fatigue gang of prisoners was busy with pails and brushes; but either it had not been thoroughly ventilated, or the dense numbers packed in it for so many hours a day had given the building an atmosphere of its own, warm and unpleasant, if not precisely foetid, after the pure, stinging air of the moorland.
"We can sleep seven hundred here," said the Commandant; "and another dormitory of the same size runs overhead.

The top story they use as a promenade and for indoor recreation." He pointed to a number of grilles set in the wall at the back, at equal distances.

"For air," he explained, "and also for keeping watch on _messieurs_.