Nowhere was there hint or sign of grace and ornament.

Bare deal-plank floor, bare white-washed walls, plank and iron truckle beds, rough plank and iron trestle tables, rough plank and iron benches, rough plank and iron boxes clamped to bedsteads, all bore the same uniform impression of useful ugliness, ugly utility.

The apologist in search of a solitary encomium might have called it clean--save around the hideous closed stove where muddy boots, coal-dust, pipe-dottels, and the bitter-end of five-a-penny "gaspers"[18] rebuked his rashness.
A less inviting, less inspiring, less home-like room for human habitation could scarce be found outside a jail.

Perhaps this was the less inappropriate in that a jail it was, to a small party of its occupants--born and bred to better things.
The eye was grateful even for the note of cheer supplied by the red cylindrical valise on the shelf above each cot, and by the occasional scarlet tunic and stable-jacket.

But for these it had been, to the educated eye, an even more grim, grey, depressing, beauty-and-joy-forsaken place than it was....
Dam (_alias_ Trooper D.Matthewson) placed the gleaming helmet upon his callous straw-stuffed pillow, carefully rubbed the place where his hand had last touched it, and then took from a peg his scarlet tunic with its white collar, shoulder-straps and facings.