parade. The day after, you refuse to go out, you
get tired of Aldborough, and you allow Mrs.
Lecount to make her suggestion. The next day,
you accept the suggestion. And the next day
to that, you go to St. Crux. Once more, my dear
sir! Thumb—works of Art. Forefinger—cut
me on the parade. Middle finger—tired of
Aldborough. Third finger—take Lecount's advice.
Little finger—off to St Crux. Nothing can be
clearer—nothing can be easier to do. Is there
anything you don't understand? Anything that
I can explain over again, before you go?"

"Only one thing," said Mr. Noel Vanstone.
"Is it settled that I am not to come here again,
before I go to St. Crux?"

"Most decidedly!" answered the captain.
"The whole success of the enterprise depends on
your keeping away. Mrs. Lecount will try the
credibility of everything you say to her, by one
test—the test of your communicating, or not,
with this house. She will watch you, night and
day! Don't call here, don't send messages, don't
write letters—don't even go out by yourself.
Let her see you start for St. Crux, on her
suggestion; with the absolute certainty in her own
mind that you have followed her advice, without
communicating it in any form whatever to me or
to my niece. Do that, and she must believe you, on
the best of all evidence for our interests, and the
worst for hers—the evidence of her own senses."

With those last words of caution, he shook
Mr. Noel Vanstone warmly by the hand, and
sent him home on the spot.

Captain Wragge retired to rest that night in
high spirits. He jocosely apostrophised the
extinguisher in his candlestick, as he raised it to
put the light out. "If I could only drop you on
Mrs. Lecount," said the captain, " I might bid
good-by to the last anxiety left, on this side of
the wedding-day!"

THE IRISH CONVICT'S PROGRESS.

IN one of the Louvre galleries is to be
seen a grim and ghastly piece of painting,
which is usually encircled by a throng of
admirers of the morbid. It represents a murderer
flying over the earth with his bloody knife
displayed conspicuously in his hand, while, from
behind, an avenging and supernatural spirit presses
on him closely, waving a spectral sword. The
allegory typifies Crime pursued by Justice. It
is of the grand French school; was bought by the
nation; and has, no doubt, considerable merit.

It is valuable, however, apart from its
pictorial excellence, as illustrating the popular
ideal as regards crime and punishment in their
relation to the community. If it dwells on the
disagreeable subject at all—always distasteful
and unpalatable—it is only in company with its
appropriate antidote—punishment, full, sound,
satisfactory, and substantial. Crime is one of the
necessary corruptions of society; but society
has within itself the sure arm of chastisement,
which shall be thus a vindication of its
outraged laws. This is the popular notion of crime
and its repression.

So, at our general jail deliveries—when the
judges of assize come their rounds purging the
prisons, and the long strings of malefactors
defile through the dock, and Messrs. Thurtell,
Greenacre, Palmer, and other distinguished
murderers, through long weary days of witnesses
and depositions, and examinations and cross-
examinations, and counsels' speeches and judge's
charge, and deliberations of jurymen, have been
successfully hunted to conviction—we, who are
interested in the peace and order of our country,
rub our hands with satisfaction, rejoicing that
there has been no miscarriage of justice. The
ugly drama is happily complete. Society has
done its part.

To different minds the idea of punishment
will present itself under different views, and for
different objects. One may be called the eye
for eye and tooth for tooth idea, which is really
the favourite notion of punishment with the
vulgar. The maimed and beaten woman chuckles
as she tells how she "got" her assaulter "six
months and hard labour." The natural feeling
is, that he who inflicted pain or injury, should
himself suffer pain or injury, in some shape
corresponding. But this is but a small part
of the complex idea of punishment. There
is a corruption in the mind which led to the
original crime. This, after the penalty has
been satisfied, naturally remains, is possibly
strengthened, and on release will lead to fresh
offence. It would appear, then, that punishment
should be of such severity as to deter and
to have soundly terrified the criminal mind.
This should surely enter into the notion of
punishment. Again, it should have the effect
of scaring others who have not yet sinned, and
thus keep the community pure. Finally, there
is some gain in the removal, wholesale or even
temporary, of the infected particles from among
us. For the time, contagion is prevented from
spreading. All these are useful elements in the
consideration of punishments.

It has been mentioned that under the
transporting system of our ancestors, brutal certainly
for its severity, these results were attained in a
broad sort of fashion. No doubt there were
monstrous evils in the details; and a mass of
indiscriminate rascality, seething and fermenting
together in a huge prison caldron, would
of itself fructify and multiply in a sort of
spontaneous generation. Still, when the
caldron was full it would be tilted and its contents
spread over the huge surface of the colonial
wastes and prairies, which absorbed it more or
less innocuously. We thus get rid of our corruptions
in bulk; very much after the principle of
a sort of mort au mouche's paper, which those
plagued with flies lay in their parlour-windows
in the sun.

But suddenly, towards the year eighteen
hundred and forty-nine, it became understood
that these useful drains would be stopped,
and that our thriving colonies had objected—
reasonably enough—to be any longer turned to