was seen in a corner of the cell, huddled up in
a heap, the very picture of pain and misery.
Then the door was opened, and the doctor, a
precise, bandbox kind of man, went into the
cell, when Mox, suddenly leaping up from her
crouching attitude, dashed herself at her visitor
and tumbled him on to the ground; and then
began one of the oddest fights on prison record.
Mox had taken off one of her "enormous shoes,
and with this she battered away at the head and
face of her opponent, changing it from hand
to hand with considerable dexterity, as fierce
clutches were made by the doctor to secure it.
It was a struggle of some duration, in which
there were several heavy falls, the doctor now
uppermost, then undermost, and the cell
reverberating with the thwacks from Mary Mox's
colossal shoe, and the oaths from her metallic
throat." The doctor conquered at last, and
Mary Mox was once more confined to the dark.
Later in the day she called out to the matron
again.

"Well?" asked the officer.

"I should like to know," Mox growled forth
in a deep bass, "what's become of my shoe.
You've no right to take a woman's shoe away.
She might catch her death of cold!"

Among the most painful of the many painful
conditions of the prison-world, is the arrival of
a lady-prisoner; of a gentlewoman, it may be,
of good birth, refined culture, and superior
education, who, by vice or crime, has fallen under
the lash of the law, and has been sent to prison
together with professional thieves, brutalised
murderers, and depraved street women. Her own
shame and anguish, the newness of everything
to her, her marked superiority to the rest
of the prison inmates, her delicacy of frame,
and the haunting remorse so different from the
callousness of the ordinary criminal class, make
the entrance of a lady-prisoner one of the saddest
days in the prison calendar. She cannot do
the hard work which is so welcome to the rest;
she can sew, and she does sew "desperately,"
says the Prison Matron, when the chance is
offered to her; but she sinks under the coarse
manual labour which is the greatest boon that
can be given to the rougher sort, and which
prevents breakings out and smashings, and a
world of other disagreeables peculiar to the
weariness of monotony. Then, another pain
lies in the visits of friends, and in the eternal
parting perhaps, when the friends are respectable,
and the prisoner is, may be, the first
who has dishonoured the family name. Those
meetings are among the most tragic incidents
possible to human nature. But sometimes they
are, if not comic, at least devoid of all gravity
or earnestness; as when that clever scamp,
known to more than one prisoner, dressed himself
up as different characters, and came to see
his friends, now as the husband of one, now as
the brother of another, but who was detected
on a third attempt, and recognised by the
chaplain as the Protean visitor.

Sometimes the visitors, while talking intelligibly,
according to the rules (which require that
an officer shall hear all that passes), will break
out into a torrent of thieves' slang or gipsy
language impossible to the matron to
understand or prevent. This infraction cuts short
the interview; but the news sought to be
communicated has been told, and the stable door is
shut after the steed has been stolen, according
to the time-honoured custom pervading human
society. To these rapid influxes of knowledge
by a moment's flood of Romany, or slang, may,
perhaps, be added an even more rapid system of
secret signs, as the means through which news
from the outside world penetrates and circulates
through the prisons. Any one who has watched
the signs ot omnibus conductors know how
much can be expressed by the hand alone; and
two Freemasons can communicate in the
presence of the uninitiated, without the least
suspicion being aroused. So that in all probability
the visitors who come to condole with their
poor friends across the grating, contrive to
convey a whole chapter of information by the turn
of a wrist or the lifting of a finger.

The officers are at times obliged to meet craft
with craft, and violence with ruse. There was
one Armstrong, a fierce, ferocious wild cat
rather than a woman—a creature subject to
almost demoniacal fits of passion—who
deliberately, wore herself out by her furies, and who
stopped at nothing—not even at harm to
herself—to attain any object on which she had set
her heart. She maimed herself; she produced
internal haemorrhage by means of powdered
glass; she would have nearly bled to death—
all to get back to the infirmary diet, to port
wine and beef-tea. She had the power of
flinging herself into a kind of cataleptic state,
which made the very doctor thoughtful—not
always able to distinguish truth from falsehood.
However, one day he caught her tripping in
the perfect ordering of her trance, so he
resolved to punish her in her own way, and to
make her stay in the infirmary rather less
pleasant than it had been. Armstrong liked
beef-tea. When in this trance she heard the
doctor order some beef-tea for her, as soon as she
was sufficiently recovered to take it. But it
was to be sent first to the surgery. Soon after
he withdrew, Armstrong faintly intimated her
desire for a little beef-tea; she was just coming
out of her trance, and was very weak and tender.
The nurse brought the basin, and Armstrong
began to sip slowly and delicately, as a half-
dying woman should. Suddenly she sprang up
in bed with a fearful oath; and then she lay
down again, shrieked, and collapsed. The doctor
had added a little asafœtida to the soup, and
Armstrong never forgave the trick. She would
have murdered him for it, had she not been
prevented.

It is impossible to go through half the
photographs presented us by the Prison Matron.
They are all graphic, all full of individuality
and character. There was Amelia Mott, the
dwarf, a tramp from her youth upward, insane
about dancing, full of coarse fun and revolting
merriment—a bold degraded woman, without a