those "making a fuss" about the merest trifles,
and reporting a wretched creature for the
infraction of the most trivial rule. This is easy
to be understood; no system being so entirely
mechanical as to exclude the influence of
individual temper. The prisoners, too, are quick
to discover and take advantage of every
circumstance that can excuse their insubordination,
or give them occasion for breaking through
the dull monotony of their life; and they resent
as an especial grievance the employment, as
matrons, of badly-born and illiterate women.
"'What do you want here, with your bounce?'
a prisoner said once to a matron of low degree.
'My father was better than yours—yours was
a common soldier, and we all know what soldiers'
daughters are.'"

It is something for these poor wretches in
their degradation to feel that they may rightfully
despise those who are put in authority
over them; but it does not tend to the better
maintenance of prison peace and order that they
should do so.

Our old friend, the Prison Matron,* has
appeared before us again, with another book
expressive of prison life, and sad enough is the
company to which she introduces us.† Some of
the women whose portraits she gives are more
like brute animals than human beings; and
some have a strange, perversity of intellect by
which their vices seem to gain in power and
subtlety, while their virtues are left all the
weaker by the diversion of intelligence. There
was Cecilia Costello, a young slim woman of
tall stature, with a broad face seamed and
scarred by small-pox, who spent her prison life
in "palling-in," that oddest of all the odd
manifestations of human affection. This "palling-in,"
or choosing a female "pal" or friend—by sight—
is one of the main difficulties with which the
matron has to contend, and is peculiar to female
prisoners; it is a thing unknown among male
convicts. "When a woman first enters on her
prison life, she looks round for her 'pal' as a
matter of course, singles her out, and by signs,
nods, and messages passed from mouth to mouth
intimates her wish to be constituted a 'pal' in
her affections. And for this 'pal' she suffers,
will go back a stage in advancement, and to a
ward where the privileges are less, for the sake
of a look at her, and a smile or whisper from
her—while the fit lasts and woman's constancy
endures."

Well, Cecilia Costello was the spirit of "palling-in"
personified. She was always "palling-in,"
and always scheming how to take away
the "pals" of other women, and how to set
friends by the ears. One of the vainest of
her sex, and one of the most loquacious—talk
she would, in or out of association; in her own
cell she would talk to herself, while admiring
the colour and shape of her hands, the size of
her foot, and the style and action of her walk.

* See vol. vii., page 487.
† In Prison Characters drawn from Life. By a
Prison Matron.

"Outside" men had quarrelled and fought for
her. lt was her "style" that caught them,
she would say—the way she had with her;
though, barring the small-pox, she was as
handsome a girl now as could be seen in
a day's walk. She knew more slang than
any one else, and was as proud of this
acquirement as the deepest-dyed blue of her
Greek and Hebrew. She had been a market-girl,
selling violets and cresses in the street
since she was a child; she was well known at
the police-courts; an old hand at petty larceny,
and habituated to prison life in all its varieties;
and she was a philosopher, and took things
easily—the rough with the smooth, as it chanced
to come, making herself as happy in her
circumstances as was possible. But, philosophic
or ill tempered—for she had her tempers, when
it suited her, for all her demure behaviour—she
never forewent a chance of making mischief on
this all-important subject of "palling-in," and
changed her friends as often as there were days
in the year. When she was told once that some
women had been quarrelling about her again,
she was quite surprised, and innocently
distressed. "I don't know much about 'em, miss,"
she said. "Wot they all wants to be nuts on
me for I can't make out; it's quite a trouble to
me, and I frets about it sometimes." "I've
done nothink," she said again, when there had
been a disturbance in consequence of her having
inveigled away another woman's "pal," and a
"breaking out" and the "dark" had been the
result. "I've done nothink. I can't help the
poor thing's breaking out. I never axed her,
and I s'pose it ain't the rules to make me
answerable for other people's goings on. I
only want to be kep to myself, and to be allowed
to keep quiet."

A very different person from this restless,
vain, intriguing street girl, clever and not
devoid of humour and invention, was the
child-murderess, Jane Weynuuoth, the Cornish
girl, who, at sixteen years of age, drowned her
neighbour's child—the mother having absconded,
leaving the little one on Jane's hands, and at
her charges. Found guilty of wilful murder,
and condemned to be hanged, the capital sentence
was commuted to one of imprisonment for life;
and Jane entered on her long term "a woman
or girl with but little knowledge of right from
wrong, not impressed in any degree by the
weight of her sentence—a dogged, resisting,
vindictive being," with a face sufficiently
expressive of her crime, "wholly brutalised,
sinister, and lowering, with the low, overhanging
felon brow peculiar to women of this class." A
desperate woman before the beginning of her
prison life, she was a desperate woman afterwards;
wild and blasphemous in her conduct
and her speech, resisting authority and advice
alike, passing from the solitary to the dark, and
from the dark to the solitary, and inclined to
die rather than to give in. She never allowed
that she had wilfully killed the child. "I set him
down on the bank to play by hisself while I
went away," she would say, when speaking of