The Escape of the Notorious Sir William Heans by William Gosse Hay

At an upper window, in the first courtyard of the Cascades Prison, a convict known as Madam Ruth sat sewing. She was making night-shirts of the rough cloth made by the prisoners on the lovely Maria Island. Below, in a large courtyard, surrounded by low buildings of gold sandstone--black-barred and doored--some grey-gowned, check-aproned women were tending vegetables under a female. Among the plants, accident had dropped some hollyhock seed, and a red rosette fluttered on a yellow spear. The afternoon sun hung on the transverse bars of the opposite windows and on the shoulder of a great forest towering over the shingles to the left.

Madam Ruth was in black, and wore a black shawl over her dark red hair. She seemed hard. In appearance she was long-faced, young, and intellectually noble, but looked anaemic and melancholy. The room in which she sat was long and narrow--with the barred window at one end, and was freshly papered in gold on a faint blue ground. Two beds of unpainted wood touched one the north and one the west wall, and both were adorned with coverlets of elaborate embroidery. There was a fireplace and small fire in the corner between the beds. The rest of the appointments were rough enough, if entirely neat. Over the window-bed, a strung shelf held some black and brown volumes: among which were Johnson's satires, Scott's poems, and some numbers of BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE. In the corner opposite there were some tomes of French History piled by the wall, and, hung above a small table, some little flower-paintings in water-colours on cardboard, and the sketch of a ruined chapel, faultily done, with a knight in stone lying within among the weeds, on which a little fawn was cropping--the subject taken, perhaps, from the "White Doe of Rylstone" by Mr. Wordsworth, a volume of whose verses, under that title, was hanging in the shelf. On the table were some loose watercolours in a cedar box, and a sketch, on a band-box lid, of an ancient, rough-cast house surrounded by decrepit trees.