of physical restraint-leg-irons, and the triangle to which prisoners are fastened for corporal punishment. When the violation of all prison dicipline is the chief end, aim, and glory of a convict, then may it be truly said that all this repression (coupled with experience and ingenuity) has to be brought into action.

A determined and desperate prisoner will, strange to say, sacrifice his personal comfort and health, and submit to wearying hours and days of restraint, lying on the floor of his cell, pinioned in a "figure of eight," unable to move, and yet unwilling to move if allowed to. Thus, after days or perhaps weeks of futile warfare against superior powers, capitulation will ensue, and good behaviour may continue throughout the sentence, which will be practically lengthened by reason of this misconduct, a large number of marks insuring a ticket-of-leave being lost, and thus the entire sentence will, most likely, have to be served in the lowest stage of prison life, affecting the personal dietary of the desperado. It is astonishing how much trouble a convict will take to be thought insane, and be sent to an asylum. Men will spend days, if not weeks, standing against the cell wall, with an expression of vacancy or extreme melancholy, hoping thus to be certified as lunatics. Nothing seems to tire them when under observation, nothing too arduous in their deception, or attempts at such. Such generally overdo their part, and, on being detected, are sent back to work with a promise of some punishment, at no distant epoch, if not very careful, of a summary and forcible nature. There is thus "an energy of idleness" in malingerers, strongly at variance with the preconceived wishes of most men. To act a long, tedious, and wearisome part for many days is a proof that these men are idle and lazy viciously, to give annoyance, and thus reap a few scattered grains of revenge, and this is the motive, we believe, actuating most prisoners who studiously feign melancholia or mania. Some men in the world outside of prison derive solace from the sorrows, backslidings, and downfalls of their fellow creatures. So it is in prison. A, B, and C are burglars, pals as they call each other in their vernacular, and C is captured redhanded in a joint burglary, and is sent to penal servitude. C is visited by an officer of the Criminal Investigation Department, who hopes to obtain from C the names of his pals in the "crack" for which C is now undergoing punishment. C is only too glad not merely to give the desired information, but also to obtain a day or two away from his cell, cherishing besides the feeling of satisfaction at sceing A and B in a party. Why should C be clad in drab, and fed with brown bread and water, when A and B are enjoying them

last in sight, but it turns out to be only the "Don," sheltered by an abattis of bilberries, as keen and alert as when, three hours ago, he was posted.

He does not shoot us, to my surprise, knowing his thirst for blood, and falls in behind me as cheery as if he had hidden the hillside with corpses. He was always so; we called it a quality of his defects, but it was an admirable one; the "Sunfish" used to stamp-in many strange oaths about his ambush, but the other effect was more pleasing.

Never shall I forget the day of the "Don's" first deer. Strangely enough, thanks to a reasonable system of stalking with Niels and Klinga, I had, after ten blank days, just dropped a wide horned bull, which had led the three of us-with a bullet between his lungs-a splendid chase up-wind, and we were working back to join the main party when we espied the "Don." He was standing, waist deep in heather, on a little hill, his cuffs turned back over his coat, his cap fallen off, blood and fire in his eye. It was a splendid sight, and not even his Norfolk jacket prevented him seeming typical of every nobly carnivorous instinct of the human heart. Down in the dell, Lars Eric and our host were stooping over the body of a slain beast; over what was left of it, one might say, for this one hornless innocent was all that fell of a herd to their combined rifles. They explained that they had all aimed at one animal, and they showed singular unanimity in selecting the worst ; others, however, they felt sure, must be wounded, or, rather, two of the party thought so; the "Don" would not risk his reputation by extending it in that fashion; his companions might have hit what they had not aimed at, he would make no claims of the sort.

As we walked down to view the body, he asked me if I had a spare cartridge.

"Oh," he replied to my astonished stare, for in those early days we used to carry a season's shooting in our pockets, "you see these beggars take such a lot of killing that I wanted to make sure."

He has since solemnly affirmed that he put but one shot into the beast after it was down, and his word as a sportsman being reliable, the feat, whether to his credit or the elk's, of emptying two pockets' load of lead through a carbine into a deer before it fell, may be put on record.

The skin, when flayed, supported his statement, but would have held nothing else.

Even to-day the "Don" was good to look at as he stepped from his post, je ng arms, and brought up the rear;

and he was hilarious when "mid-däg" was announced, and we sat down to a lunch of cold eggs, white cheese and rye cake, peach apples, and gallons of milk, food for gods when breakfast seems like a reminiscence of some previous existence, which, at nine hours' interval, it does.

The beaters took little but milk, and less of that than did the dogs, and, after a pipe, we started for fresh ground, to repeat the morning's method and failure, with the difference only of degrees of wetness in one's post, which was either a bog, a lake, or a stream. The illusion of being the one living creature in the world was always perfect, while that of expecting elk, or of keeping a dry stitch on one's body, passed off early in the day.

It was dark when Carl's whistle called me from my post, and we trudged together uphill to the herdsman's hut in which we were to sleep. The "Don" was there already, with coffee before him and a plate of sweet cakes, over which we agreed that such a day as we had spent was the best thing to look back on in the world.

The "Sunfish" did not arrive till much later; he had been forgotten, and, in some secluded hollow, kept the echoes awake for many hours after nightfall, till his pouch was emptied. It was, I believe, the biggest big-game shoot he ever had, and though it only brought down the search party, gave him, with a cleaning-rod and a mouthful of anathema, occupation until bed-time.

That was the first of many like days of hard walking and harder waiting; long lonely silent days, consuming more patience than powder, and merry nights spent in every sort of habitable eccentricity, foresters' lodges, leans-to of the cowherd, charcoal burners' huts, woodmen's booths, fallen rick-sheds, decaying barns. With any roof that would withhold the rain we learnt to be abundantly content, for under it there was always a leaping fire, the best of coffee, and the sweetest of country cakes.

One account may serve for all, of hours too similar and too sterile, but the ending of our first elk might be told for the sake of its picturesque surroundings.

It had been brought down from the woods on a sled, with much unnecessary vigour and shouting, and after supper we went out to the village green, a slope of grass slanting down to the shadow of the pine woods and the bubble of racing waters, where, on a wooden trestle and amid many torches, the elk was wedged, his legs sticking up stupidly at the sky. The air was clear, but cold with the coming dew, and the circle of flaming pine knots threw aloft a shifting and smoky brightness. The deer was already split open and part skinned;

an old dame was dragging his digestive apparatus into her apron, chanting a dirge like melody; others, with their gleaming knives, were stripping the skin or hewing at the joints, adding a plaintive cadence here and there to her lay. Their faces and arms were smeared with red from the smoky flame, unpleasantly suggestive; and the keen blades flashed in and out of the denser redness below like silver needles. We decided it was pleasanter to slay your elk than to flay him, and walked down to the smelting-house of the district, which stood, with the forge, where the road and river passed again into. the impenetrable darkness of the pines. A lurid ray stretched upwards through the open door, and the rough-made windows glowed like fiery eyes in the long black wall. Within, the liquid metal hissed. and spluttered, almost drowning at times the din of clashing hammers from the forge; the smelters, naked but for a leather frontlet, gaunt and shrivelled, with sinews like a panther, and wet with heat, moved weirdly about, transformed by the chance springing of a furnace door, or sudden volley of molten sparks, from dusky shadows into scarlet fiends.

At the entrance, within sound of the Runic chant, rising and falling under the fitful torchlight on the hill, the bubbling water, the uncommunicable moan of the forest, the hiss of melting and the clang of hammered metal, it was easy to fancy oneself in the land of old Norse fable at some window to the under world.

As we walked back, after many pipes, up the sloping meadow to our hut, the withered moon rose, a mere thread of silver in the sky, and a cool air floated up from the lake; it would be mist by morning. The north was growing pale with shapeless gusts of light, and, as we crossed the green, the last smoking pine knot fell down on the deserted trestle. It was so still, one could hear the sound of those scattered ashes, and, from some far away hamlet in the black woods, the sleepy baying of a hound.

FRANCIS PREVOST.

M°

PRISONS AND PRISONERS.

OST people know the meaning of the word "Prisons,” at least it conveys a greater or less idea of something not very pleasant, not to be sought after, but to be avoided, as a place of gloom and penance. Let us give a definition of what a prison really is. It is a building for the safe custody of three great classes of individuals, and they are (1) convicted prisoners; (2) unconvicted or remand prisoners; (3) surety, debtor, and contempt of court prisoners.

The first two classes are very commonly met with by those visiting prisons; the third, more seldom, and, in some local prisons, not at all. Having opened the case with these few general remarks, let us now proceed to describe the general outlines of one of Her Majesty's prisons, taking, as a type, Pentonville prison, London, which is a hard labour establishment, in contradistinction to a penal servitude prison, in which those under sentences of penal servitude are confined. The general differences between local and convict prisons will be dealt with later on.

Now, the great mainstay and keystone of all penal establishments. is, that they have doors and gates, and these are always inaccessible, for both free and bound, without the necessary passes; for the former, an order to view the prison is requisite, for the latter, completion or commutation of sentence, or remission of some kind or other.

So far as the facility of leaving a prison is in question, the difficulties are no greater than that of getting into the same, one being as closed to both persons, with this distinction, that neither parties are on the same side of the doors. Having demonstrated your right to admission, then, you enjoy the rights of both entering and subsequently leaving the establishment without being a slave of time, or, in other words, a prisoner.

A sternly frowning mass of stone guards the large gates, on the right hand of which is the lodge, in which there is always a gatekeeper, who enters the arrival (with the exact minute of the same)