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CHAPTER I.

A STRANGE LIFE AND DEATH.

“A man that were to sleep your sleep, and a hangman to help him to bed, I think he would change places with his officer; for look you, sir, you know not which way you shall go.”

IT is well known, of course, that there exists in most of our large cities, behind all their din and traffic and ceaseless energy of human existence, a silent world where life, as vivid and eager as that which teems in the busy streets, is pent up, for ever unheard and unseen. But the full significance of that fact, with its dire import on some of the most complex problems of our time, can only be rightly apprehended by those who are allowed to page: 2 enter there as habitual visitors, and to hold unrestrained intercourse with its inmates. This is a privilege for which permission must be given by the highest authorities, and it is not always easily obtained. It was granted, however, to the present writer, and it has resulted in a ten years’ most intimate acquaintance with the very peculiar population which is to be found in those criminal establishments. Persons who pay a mere visit of curiosity to a prison, and are conducted by an official along rows of immaculately clean cells, where orderly prisoners are at work in perfect silence, cannot have the smallest conception of the extraordinary revelations in human nature, and in possibilities of human destiny, which are made known to those who are allowed to penetrate into the unveiled realities of the strange life that writhes within the impervious prison walls. Hidden there are elements of the deepest tragedy: abnormal facts, which raise the most intricate questions in moral responsibility and other psychological problems; true histories, equalling the wildest romance that imagination could picture; page: 3 while on the other hand the daily routine is constantly enlivened by incidents that are irresistibly comic. Volumes might be filled with illustrations from all the various phases of prison life, and we purpose in these pages to give a selection from such as seem to us most striking and suggestive; but we desire especially to bring forward those which, besides their strong human interest, have an important bearing on a question that has always roused much diversity of opinion—that of the Lex talionis.

The capital penalty enforced by the existing law of England on all who, under any circumstances short of self‐defence, destroy the life of a fellow‐creature, stands on a totally different footing from any other legal punishment, inasmuch as it is one of which no human being can gauge the meaning or the extent. Sentences which are to be carried out within the limits of this mortal life can be exactly proportioned to the crime, dealing with a man’s visible existence only, and leaving wholly untouched his possible destiny in other unknown spheres; but once commit him to the great mystery of death, and the living spirit passes from the page: 4 hangman’s hands into conditions absolutely impenetrable to us, and with which, therefore, it may well be doubted if we have any right to tamper. The usual arguments in favour of capital punishment, which affirm that it is a deterrent from crime—necessary for the public safety, and the only penalty dreaded by the criminal classes—were all met in a rather remarkable manner by certain cases which occurred in the prison with which the writer is connected. Three men, at short intervals of time, were brought to that gaol charged with precisely the same crime—the murder of their wives; but the individuals were in character and antecedents, and in many other respects, so entirely dissimilar, that the deductions to be drawn from their histories are very different in their nature. The case of the first we shall record, illustrates very strikingly the difficulty of holding the scales of justice evenly in those momentous decisions, where the lives of persons more or less criminal hang in the balance,—as well as some other considerations which will be sufficiently obvious from a simple recital of the facts.

Ted Brown, whose real name is not given for necessary reasons, was an elderly man, and when his age came to be questioned, he himself declared that he was upwards of eighty—but he was generally believed to be in fact about sixty years old. His family, which had originally consisted of fourteen children, had been reduced by accidents and disease to three alone—a grown‐up daughter, and a quite young boy and girl. We have had a good deal of information lately, in various ways, respecting the very low state of civilisation which obtains among the poorer classes in our large towns, but it is scarcely possible to realise a life so completely on a level with that of the beasts of the field—if not below it—as was the normal existence of Ted Brown and his family. The man himself was not only absolutely illiterate, but of so low an order of intelligence that he was very happily characterised by one of the prison officials as the missing link which Darwinism seeks to find between our race and the Ascidians. It may really be doubted, however, whether any respectable gorilla would have demeaned himself to Ted Brown’s level.

At the time when the event took place which brought him under the grasp of the law, Ted inhabited a mansion of his own construction, on an open common in the vicinity of a large town. It consisted of two or three old blankets suspended over upright sticks, so as to form a species of tent, in which he burrowed with his wife and two younger children. The eldest daughter had long before abandoned this uninviting family home, to get her living in a manner far from conducive to even the lowest standard of morals. The income of the whole party was limited to such small sums as could at irregular intervals be obtained by the manufacture of wooden pegs for clothes‐lines, which were sold by Mrs Brown in the streets of the town, to which she was daily sent by her husband for that purpose. Ted himself meantime reclined luxuriously on a heap of straw in his airy abode, smoking the short black pipe which was the one possession in the world that was truly dear to his soul. His wife was therefore eminently useful to him. She did all the work, and procured the means of subsistence for the entire family, toiling page: 7 from morning till night, while the life which her husband was enabled to lead by her labour, might have been compared to that of a Turkish Pasha in reduced circumstances. The woman was a poor simple creature, harmless enough, but with the mildest possible conception of the difference between right and wrong. She had lived with Ted for more than thirty years, and been the mother of his fourteen children, but she had not always been his wife; that dignity had been conferred upon her at a much later period, in the interests of the higher morality, by a benevolent clergyman who had come across them in the course of their wanderings from place to place. The couple had lived more or less harmoniously together till a few years previously, when Ted had been laid aside for a time by an attack of rheumatic fever—a malady which, considering the nature of his abode, might have been expected to fasten permanently on the whole family. During his compulsory retirement from this cause in some pauper hospital, he believed that his wife had acted in a manner to arouse his jealousy. For this offence, real or supposed, he page: 8 never forgave her; and when any circumstance recalled it to his memory, he was in the habit of beating her in a very violent manner.

On a certain cold winter’s night the family went to bed as usual—that is, they lay down on the ground of the open common, sheltered only by their blanket tent—the two children sleeping one on each side of their mother. Ted had bestowed high‐sounding appellations on his progeny, which contrasted very oddly with their circumstances. The boy was invested with the titles as well as the name of a royal personage; and the girl was endowed with a designation, probably taken from that of a ship, which was equivalent to the word Britannia. It was from her account that the events of that fatal night became known. She was apparently about ten or eleven years of age, though said to be older, and in her the resemblance to the gorilla tribe was quite as strongly marked as in her father. In all her ways and movements she was exactly like a monkey, with the one exception that she could speak with a human tongue, in the lowest dialect of her native page: 9 county. According to her statement, she awoke on the night in question to find that her “dad”—stung probably by some sudden recollection of his grievance against his wife—was stretching across her in order to reach her “mammy,” whom he was “hitting,” as she expressed it, with great fierceness. Britannia lay still and watched the proceedings,—it was only what she had witnessed many times before; but on that starlit night Ted went further than he intended or knew. When at last he desisted, and turned round to go to sleep again, his unfortunate wife, who is not said to have uttered a single cry or complaint, “scrawled,” to use Britannia’s peculiar phraseology, out of the tent, apparently with the intention of getting some water to drink from a little streamlet which ran through the common at a few yards’ distance. She did not return, and presently the child went out to see what had become of her. She found the poor woman lying quite dead, with her feet in the water. Britannia ran back to her father and told him that her mother would not move or speak. Ted rose and page: 10 followed her to the spot she pointed out. There, in the dim starlight, he looked down into the dead woman’s face, and gradually became aware of the result of the discipline to which he had subjected her. Having satisfied himself that life was extinct, he dragged her inanimate form back into the tent with the help of his little daughter. Then the remaining members of the family composedly lay down by the side of the corpse and slept till morning. So soon as the daylight dawned, Ted went out to gather sticks wherewith to kindle his fire, and being apparently somewhat embarrassed by the lifeless burden of which he had become possessed, he told Britannia to go to the cottage of a labouring man who had occasionally passed through the common and spoken a few friendly words to him, and tell him that he wished to see him.

This neighbour presently arrived, and Ted went cheerfully to meet him, carrying the sticks with which he was about to prepare his breakfast. He at once announced the tragic event of the preceding night in the following terms: “We have got a dead ’un here this morning.” The labourer page: 11 went into the tent, and what he saw there decided him to go for the nearest policeman, without any intimation of his intention to the family. That functionary speedily arrived, and had no doubt whatever as to his duty. On the following night Ted slept within four stone walls, sheltered from the wind and weather, the first time for many a year.

In due course he was brought to trial. His own little girl was the principal witness against him, and the judge, having heard Britannia’s account of the tragedy, practically directed the jury to find him guilty of the wilful murder of his wife.

Now, as a matter of fact, Ted had been guilty of wilful cruelty to an extent which no doubt deserved severe punishment; but of wilful murder he was not either legally or morally guilty. To kill his wife was the very last thing he either wished or intended: not that he had any real love for her,—his pipe being, as we have said, the sole object of his affections,—but because the loss of her useful services would have rendered her death, even from natural causes, a most dis‐ page: 12 astrous disastrous calamity to him. However, the usual grim sentence followed the verdict; and Ted—such as we have described him in his mental and moral characteristics—was left to face, within little more than a fortnight, what Carlyle was wont to call “the eternities.”

The duty of preparing him for this tremendous change necessarily devolved on the prison chaplain, and all that zeal and earnestness could effect, that good man would undoubtedly have brought to bear on the task; but he was met at the very outset by a serious difficulty. Ted, in his cogitations over his terrible position, which was quite inexplicable to himself, had evolved out of his gorilla‐like consciousness a very peculiar explanation of the whole affair. He became convinced that his impending doom, instead of being appointed by the law, was really a commercial transaction harmoniously arranged, for their own pecuniary benefit, between Jack Ketch and the chapel‐man, by which names he designated the executioner and the clergyman. He imagined that they would be given an equivalent in money page: 13 for value received, so soon as they could deliver up the strangled body of Ted Brown to the authorities; and as his life was decidedly precious to himself, he fixed in his own mind what he considered to be the very high sum of £5, as being the price bargained for by the two partners in the arrangement. When the chaplain, therefore, proceeded to the condemned cell to commence the course of theological training which was to fit Ted in seventeen days for an entrance on the eternal mysteries, he was dismayed by the very unexpected greeting with which he was received. Poor Ted fell prone upon his knees before him, and holding up beseeching hands, implored of him generously to forego the £2, 10s., which would be the clerical gentleman’s share of the price to be paid for himself, when he should have been effectually done to death by the hangman’s rope. If the chapel‐man would thus give up his half of the gratuity, Ted considered it would be of no use for Jack Ketch to try and hold on to his fifty shillings, and he would be ready to make any amount of wooden pegs for them both in the course page: 14 of his future career, so as to liquidate the debt which he would thus incur towards them. The unfortunate chapel‐man was left to grapple with the difficulty of raising Ted, in one fortnight, from this level of intelligence respecting his position, to a fitting state of preparation for his departure into the realms unseen.

Meantime another person connected with the prison was occupied with the fate of the little Britannia.

It had been this child’s evidence, and hers alone, which had brought her father to the scaffold; and as it had not been by any means to Ted’s mind that the girl who had been his small slave all the days of her life should give a detailed account of his manners and customs in open court, he had glared upon her from the dock with a look of fury which she could not easily forget. In spite of her great affinity in many respects to the monkey tribe, Britannia had one prominent human trait, in her strong power of affection. The manner in which she attached herself with an absolutely blind trust to the prison visitor who took an interest in her page: 15 was very touching; and it was evident, from her references to the scene at the trial, that in after years, if her intelligence were developed by education, the recollection of her own share in her father’s fate, and his consequent rage against her, might be to her a source of lasting pain. Her friend was anxious, therefore, to win his forgiveness for her before the end, and arranged to have an interview with him for that purpose within a few hours of his execution. It seemed that the near approach of death was rousing some feelings of natural affection in Ted’s darkened mind, and that it might afford him a gleam of comfort in his sad position, to hear that the child had been placed in a home where she would be kindly treated and provided for. To procure him this consolation, therefore, the arrangements for sending her to an orphanage a long distance from the city where he was waiting his doom were hastily concluded, and her friend went to visit her there, in order to receive from her some kind messages to be conveyed to the rapidly dying man. These plans were, however, instantly overthrown by that page: 16 which is the bane of many of our modern schemes of benevolence—a species of moral red‐tapism that surrounds otherwise useful charities with a number of petty stringent rules, so despotically maintained as often to frustrate entirely the good objects for which the institutions were founded. Instead of being able to receive Britannia’s last messages to her father, the visitor was ushered into a committee‐room, where a formidable circle of portentous‐looking females announced that the poor half‐monkey child had infringed certain small regulations of the establishment, and must be instantly dismissed, to find another home as best she could. The head and front of her offending appeared to be, that she had, with other reckless statements, informed a small companion that her father was about to be hanged, which information she had been ordered not to impart to any one.

Of course, if she were to be thus summarily expelled, all hope seemed at an end that the poor father, on the brink of death, could have the comfort of hearing she was safe in a permanent home, and this plea for her being retained was anxiously page: 17 pressed on the redoubtable committee. The painful facts were heard with sphinx‐like imperturbability, and the decision was repeated. The ladies wished the child to be removed, and the money which had been paid for a year’s maintenance would be returned, deducting her board for the few days she had inhabited the house.

Fortunately a person of more liberal mind than this “charitable” committee, volunteered to give the poor child a home under the sad circumstances, and thus afford the unhappy man a last consolation. Having seen her safely housed under the kind care thus secured to her, Britannia’s friend was therefore allowed to go to the condemned cell very shortly before the execution, to tell Ted that the child was definitely provided for, and to beg him to send her some kindly message of forgiveness, which would be a comfort to her in after years. The iron‐banded door having been unlocked, the warder in charge was told to wait outside by a superior official, and a chair placed for the visitor, who took the dying criminal’s band and said a few words to satisfy page: 18 him, in the first instance, that it was a friend and not an enemy who had come to him; for poor Ted might well have arrived at the conclusion that all the persons who approached him were united in a conspiracy to remove him, as speedily as possible, from this visible sphere. Despite his affinity to the gorilla nature, Ted Brown was not insensible to the touch of human sympathy; and he never relaxed his grasp of the visitor’s hand during the whole interview. It was somewhat like a bad dream to sit beside that strong, stalwart man, full of life and energy, and to know that in a few hours he would be lying stiff and stark under six feet of earth in the prison yard—and his own remarks, which reverted perpetually in a very curious manner to the fate awaiting him, did not tend to lessen this impression. Naturally he was anxious to explain his reasons for the peculiar treatment of his wife, which had terminated—to him so unexpectedly—in her death, and in touching on this topic he suddenly displayed a degree of delicacy which seemed strangely at variance with his grosser characteristics—he stopped short in his recital page: 19 of her misdeeds, and asked leave to whisper to the officer present, some details which he did not consider fit for the ears of his visitor. It was, however, worse than useless that he should continue to go back over the irrevocable past; his future, of which the minutes might easily have been counted, was all that was left to him.

When the conversation was forcibly brought round to the subject of Britannia, he indulged at first in a fierce burst of passion against her for having brought him to the gallows; but he soon saw that this was very distasteful to his visitor, and poor Ted evidently thought that, in his critical position, it would be his wisest policy to try and please every one all round—so he changed his tone, and meekly agreed to do whatever was required of him with regard to the child.

“Yes, I’ll forgive her,” he said. “I’ll not think no more of them lies she told, for all I never did nothink worse to my wife nor she deserved—a hussy! Just you think of it—me lying crippled up with the rheumatics, and her agoing flaunting out with that there fellow—”

“But about Britannia,” interrupted the visitor, stopping these reminiscences—“you will send your love to her, will you not?”

“Yes, yes; you can tell her I bears no malice, and as how I hopes she’ll grow up a bright woman;” and then he suddenly interpolated his paternal good wishes with the ghastly question—“Do you think, now, it will take them five minutes to kill me?”

The end of the tragedy for poor gorilla‐like Ted came in the shape of a fainting‐fit, complete enough to produce total insensibility, into which he fell on the scaffold, from sheer terror of the death that overtook him before he recovered—and so terminates the history of the application of human justice to his individual case.

It is one of the peculiarities of the Silent World—where men and women have sometimes to expiate their offences by a dreadful death at the hands of their fellow‐creatures—that the other criminals located there remain in total ignorance of the tragedy being enacted in their midst. The officers are never allowed to hold any communication with the convicts except such as may be necessary for the enforcement of discipline; and even the appointed visitor who is privileged to talk to them freely of their own concerns, is bound to adhere to the same rule with regard to all other subjects. Thus it is that the only pris‐ page: 23 oners prisoners who can have even a suspicion that an execution is going to take place under the very roof which shelters themselves, are the men who are told off to dig the grave of their yet living companion, on the day before his death.

It chanced, therefore, that the visitor had, during this same period, to pass from the ghastly associations of the condemned cell to the female prison, where the officials were being kept in a state of lively excitement by the proceedings of one of the inmates. While strange aspects of human nature and most pathetic histories are brought to light in intercourse with convicted women, it often happens that strangely eccentric characters appear among them, whose fantastic careers cannot be accounted for on any known principles of human action. Such an individual was No. 26, who was undergoing a long sentence in the same prison with Ted Brown at the time of his compulsory exit from it. She was a tall, handsome woman, with fine features and brilliant black eyes, which were for ever flashing restlessly from side to side. She had been well educated, page: 24 and carried herself with the air of a princess—maintaining in her quiet days a haughty demeanour, which she seldom relaxed, except in the case of the prison visitor, of whom she was graciously pleased to approve.

No. 26 shared in one invariable characteristic of female prisoners whose crimes have not been of the gravest type, that she was, according to her own account, a model of all the virtues. Women who are committed on charges of murder, manslaughter, or attempted suicide, are generally in too despairing a frame of mind to attempt any denial of the truth; but where their offences have been theft, assault, or other minor misdeeds, they systematically invent the most plausible explanations of the misadventure which has consigned them, as they affirm, in perfect innocence, to the prison cells. Sometimes, according to their statement, it has simply been the dense stupidity of the benighted judge who sentenced them, which has led to the catastrophe; but more frequently it has been a false friend, who has taken advantage of their confiding docility to shelter all manner page: 25 of crimes behind their own immaculate virtue. The perpetual appearance of this stereotyped false friend, soon taught the visitor to dismiss the phantom on all occasions very summarily; and the imaginary deceiver of No. 26 having been so dealt with, she ceased any attempt to set aside the grim evidence given by the judicial record of her former convictions, and was fain to admit that she had been incarcerated many times before, for offences of various kinds. It soon became known that in every one of these prisons she had made the lives of the officials a burden to them, and some of her freaks were certainly of a very exasperating nature. On one occasion, when she was inhabiting the convict establishment of a large city, she announced that she had a complaint to make respecting the prison authorities, and demanded to be taken before the magistrates for that purpose. This is a request which is never denied to a prisoner who desires to bring forward any serious charge against the governing officials—and as No. 26 preserved an imperturbable silence on the subject of her grievance, it was concluded page: 26 that it must be of a formidable nature. There was, therefore, quite an array of magistrates assembled to hear her statement, and the governor, chaplain, and other superior officers of the prison were summoned to be present. No. 26 was conducted before them, and solemnly ordered to proffer her accusation against those to whose custody she had been committed. She at once replied, in stately measured tones, that she felt it her duty to bring a charge against the chaplain,—the reverend gentleman there present,—for the criminal dulness of the wretched sermons to which he condemned his ill‐used congregation Sunday after Sunday. They were not only quite worthless, she said, in style and composition, but also extremely illogical, inasmuch as he was perpetually attacking the female prisoners for their slight misdemeanours, while he passed lightly over the offences committed by the persons of his own sex on the male side of the prison. She requested that the magistrates would order an inquiry into his preaching powers, when she believed it would be found that he was possessed of none whatever. page: 27 The countenance of the chaplain was seen to assume various shades of blue and green during this address, delivered much after the fashion of a counsel for the prosecution, until the magistrates could sufficiently overcome their smothered laughter to reprove the critical prisoner with befitting sternness, and order her immediate removal to her cell. A considerable time elapsed before she completed the term of her sentence in that city, and after a very brief period of liberty some fresh misdeeds consigned her to the jail which was the last home of Ted Brown.

When No. 26 came under the visitor’s notice in her new compulsory retirement, she manifested so strong a desire to listen to advice and reform her ways on all points, that it was resolved to make a great effort to effect a radical change in her mode of disposing of her existence. It was known that her relations were highly respectable people, who had done their utmost for her many times, only to see her fall back into her wild lawless life more recklessly than before, and they had finally given her up in despair, and refused to page: 28 recognise her at all. Plans were made, however, by the visitor for placing her in a position where she could begin a new life, and gain her own livelihood in an honest and suitable manner. She professed herself much pleased with the arrangement, which she knew involved considerable outlay, and the demons of passion and unrest with which she had been formerly possessed appeared to be completely laid. She went on thoroughly well till within a short time of the day when she was to obtain her discharge from prison, and then there was a lamentable change: she had scented the breath of freedom approaching speedily, and became simply intoxicated with it. One morning the visitor was met, on arriving at the jail, with the information that No. 26 had “broken out”—the prison term for a wild fit of seeming madness which from time to time seizes on the women confined within its walls. What had been the cause of this sudden attack?—there was literally no cause. The regulation breakfast had been brought as usual to No. 26, being absolutely identical with that provided for all the other women, when she page: 29 had instantly burst into a wild fit of fury, declaring that her bread was less in weight than that destined for her companions. She tore off her cap, always an object of abhorrence, sent her long black hair flying out on the wind, and dashed like a maniac into the courtyard which separated her from the men’s side of the prison, wrenching herself out of the hands of the officers who tried to control her. There she announced her intention of scaling the wall,—a feat that at any other time would have been absolutely impossible, but did not at that moment seem beyond the preternatural strength with which her passion had endowed her; and once on the other side, she declared she would make her way to the kitchen, take violent possession of the cook, a stout man some six feet high, and then and there boil him to a pulp in his own copper. These—the visitor was told—were her precise words, shouted out at the top of her voice; and although it had been found possible to prevent her from carrying out this unusual culinary operation, she could not be hindered from spreading ruin and devastation round her in the punishment‐ page: 30 cell, to which she had been conveyed by the united efforts of a considerable number of prison officials. She had not been many minutes securely locked in there, when ominous sounds of a very violent description were heard to proceed from her abode; and a view of her position being taken through the inspection grating, she was seen standing clothed in dilapidated garments, and surrounded not only with everything the place contained smashed to atoms, but with quantities of the plaster and lime from the walls. She must have sprung at them like a wild cat to a considerable height, and she had succeeded in laying the actual stones bare to a very great extent. Enveloped in the clouds of dust she had raised, No. 26 poured forth such a volley of threats and blasphemous invectives against the officer, whose presence she detected behind the grating, that the visitor was strongly recommended not to attempt to have an interview with her—it was thought to be decidedly unsafe. That, however, was not the opinion of the individual in question, whose experience had shown that even the most lawless spirits can be tamed by kindness page: 31 when once their affections have been roused. The idea of leaving the unfortunate No. 26 in the deplorable condition to which she had reduced herself was not to be entertained for a moment. By dint of obstinate insistence on the right of seeing any prisoner in that portion of the jail, however refractory, the visitor had the door of the punishment‐cell opened, and entered it alone, knowing well that the presence of an official would have been fatal to any hope of quieting the woman. Certainly there proved to be no need for the least exercise of courage. The moment No. 26 saw her friend, she stopped short in a renewed attack she was making on the walls, let her hands fall by her sides, and opened wide her great black eyes in a look first of amazement, then of distress.

“You!” she exclaimed at last,—“is it really you come into this horrible place! I could not have dreamt that you would come here! If I had only known it, I would never have made such a frightful mess—I never thought for a moment you would have to stand in the midst of it! Stay; page: 32 you must not set your feet in all that rubbish,”—and quickly tearing off a handkerchief which covered her shoulders, she went down on her knees and spread it on the stone floor of the cell—insisting that the visitor’s feet should be placed on it, so that they might avoid all contact with the heaps of lime and dust she had accumulated there. It was a touching instance of the good feeling which underlay poor No. 26’s fiendish temper, and which generally does exist more or less, even in the most brutalised prisoners.

A quiet conversation followed, during which she became perfectly meek, and really remorseful for her conduct. Unfortunately she could not always be under influences of this description—prison rules required the infliction of penalties for her insubordination, and poor No. 26 soon forgot her temporary conversion and went from bad to worse, till the day of her discharge arrived. By that time she had succeeded in inventing serious charges against every one of the prison authorities, from the governor downwards, including even the once‐favoured visitor; and she announced her in‐ page: 33 tention intention of making their various iniquities fully known to the world, by proclaiming them aloud, during her very first moments of freedom, when she would walk for that purpose through the public streets of the city in which the prison was situated.

As it was decidedly desirable to prevent such a proceeding, if possible, No. 26 was told that her railway fare would be paid to a place at a distance, where it was known she really wished to go, and an elderly warder was desired to accompany her to the station and see her safe off. He did not relish his task, but scarcely anticipated the extent of his difficulties. The moment No. 26 found herself outside the door of the prison, she knew that she was a perfectly free woman, and that the authorities had no longer any power over her, whereupon she gave the reins to her capricious temper, and declared that she would not go to the station till she had carried out her purpose of marching through the streets of the town, and there publicly announcing that the once respected officials of the jail were arrant villains, one and all.

At that moment the chaplain, most unfortunately for himself, came in at the outer gate, and instantly darting towards him, No. 26 collared him, metaphorically, and violently demanded instant redress for her injuries, while the officers still remaining safely within the walls looked out from the windows, and, it is to be feared, greatly enjoyed the scene. The elderly warder was, however, equal to the occasion. He blandly approached the woman while she was executing a species of fancy dance round the passive form of the dismayed clergyman, and reminded her that if she carried out her plan of a public denunciation of the prison authorities in the open streets, she would thereby reveal the disagreeable fact that she had herself been a denizen of that unsatisfactory abode; whereas, if she accompanied him to the station with all the airs and graces she could so well assume, it would be concluded that she was simply a fascinating lady, being escorted by an admiring gentleman on a journey of pleasure.

These tactics prevailed. No. 26 released the chaplain, whom she, like the Ancient Mariner, had page: 35 been holding with her glittering eye, and departed elegantly for the station. Thither she arrived, after having had one or two renewed outbursts on the way, which the warder afterwards declared had sent a cold tremor through him; but he at last succeeded in getting her into the train, and returned home in an exhausted condition.

It might seem at first sight as if this system of periodical “breakings out,” which is largely adopted by the lower class of female prisoners, were a mere unreasoning indulgence in temper; but it is not so—it has a distinct rationale of its own, illogical enough, no doubt, but a well‐considered method in the apparent madness. The object of it is simply one of deliberate revenge for the pains and penalties to which their imprisonment subjects them. The women are perfectly aware that by these paroxysms of violence they give a great deal of trouble and annoyance to the officers, whose duty it is to carry out all the unpleasant conditions of the sentences they have brought on themselves by their offences against the law. And it is really extraordinary what an amount of extra page: 36 punishment they will willingly undergo in order to have the gratification of thus revenging themselves. We had a curious instance of this on one occasion. A woman who had frequently been imprisoned for small offences was brought before the magistrates, on a charge which would only have involved the detention of a few weeks. She prided herself on her elegance of manner and diction, having in former times been a governess; and nothing could be more meek or graceful than the way in which she pleaded with the magistrates to let her off for once. She assured them that if they abstained from sending her to prison, she would immediately retire into a virtuous seclusion, and enter on a course of the highest morality. They were deaf to her entreaties, however, and felt bound to inflict on her what was really a very lenient sentence. No sooner was it pronounced, and the police were approaching to remove her, than she executed with amazing dexterity the plan which had been in her mind from the first. During the very time when she was mildly pleading for indulgence, she had managed, by a subtle page: 37 unseen movement, to remove one of her shoes, and hide it under her shawl: and the moment the chief magistrate ceased speaking she drew it out, as quick as lightning, from its concealment, and flung it at his head with such precision of aim as effectually to land it in the position she most desired. Of course the result of such an outrage on the judicial dignity was the immediate doubling of her sentence under severe conditions. But that was simply nothing to her, in comparison with the exquisite enjoyment of that moment, when she saw her muddy old shoe flying through the air to lodge on the magisterial cranium. Even when she spoke of it afterwards in the presence of the visitor, to whom she wished to be abnormally respectful, she had difficulty in repressing her shrieks of delight at the recollection of that ineffable moment.

These are merely the lighter aspects of prison life; but they can only afford a very passing relief to the sadness and pain which must habitually weigh on those who are brought in contact with all the dark and tragic episodes that page: 38 usually mark the records of that strange silent world.

Our connection with it has mainly brought before us the more serious conditions of convict existence; and we venture to hope that what has been learned by practical experience as the appointed visitor of a model jail, may prove usefully suggestive to some of those who are concerned in the administration of the law and the general treatment of criminals.