session; and therefore plenty of time to prepare
your defence. You can see your solicitor
every day in a glass case; you can see
your wife or friends for one half hour every
day through two thick rows of iron bars, at
the end of a windy passage, in the presence
of a turnkey; and you can make your anxious
inquiries after your young family, with half
a dozen fellow prisoners near you shouting
to their friends who stand by the side of your
suffering wife. You are not confined to the
prison diet; but are allowed, upon payment,
the privilege, as a prisoner awaiting trial, of
having your meals sent in from one particular
eating-house in the Old Bailey—the only
eating-house authorised to serve the prisoners
with the food of presumptive innocence or
suspected guilt. Some of your companions,
who are convicted thieves of different degrees
of magnitude, merely awaiting their transfer
to another place, are not allowed to participate
in the extra-mural fare. At night you
are serenaded with the howls of the ruffian
who beat out his wife's brains the other day
with a mallet, and awaits hanging for the
crime on the following Monday. Once a
week you have to wash and sweep the yard
where you and the other prisoners take your
daily confined and dreary walk. This is not
the Newgate of the last century, Mr. Milkyway
but the Newgate of this present May,
eighteen hundred and fifty-eight. You
thought a man was considered innocent, and
treated accordingly until proved guilty by a
jury of his countrymen. Judge! Emanuel
Milkyway, you are an unfortunate and
mistaken man.

Your defence must be no niggardly one.
On the night when the man was robbed and
murdered, you stayed late at the bankinghouse
settling a difficult balance, and to
shorten the road home, you struck across
the field where the crime was committed.
Two common men saw you enter the field, a
policeman on duty saw you come out of it.
They recollect something: they imagine more,
and they depose to what they recollect and
what they imagine altogether, until a very
ugly case is got up against you. Emanuel
Milkyway, you must, at any cost, retain the
great Old Bailey pleader, Mr. Serjeant Lungs,
or it will go hard with you on the day of
trial!

Out comes the little, careful deposit from
the St. Lucre parochial savings bank; away
goes the little family plate and the few
jewels, and Mr. Serjeant Lungs, to the great
mental relief of your poor suffering family, is
retained.

Mr. Serjeant Lungs is convivial, is lazy, is
selfish, and he professes to be doubtful of the
innocence of his client. Any way, Mr. Serjeant
Lungs does not see in the case any
splendid field for forensic display, and, while
he retains the fees, he neglects to study his
brief. The sessions commence at last, and
several important trials come between you
and your judge. Mr. Serjeant Lungs is glad
of an excuse to suggest a traversal, and your
solicitor, knowing the magnitude of the
interest at stake, is unwilling to advise an
opposition to this course, although it leads to
delay and expense. Ostensibly that you may
have the benefit of a deliberate trial—in
reality that Mr. Serjeant Lungs may obtain
additional time to study his brief—you are
advised to allow your case to stand over
until the next session; and you submit to
another fortnight's mental agony and physical
confinement.

At last the important day arrives; Mr.
Serjeant Lungs endeavours to supply the
place of care with his usual felicitous force;
you have no evidence to back him; the
evidence on the other side is unscrupulous and
unwavering; you are found guilty, sentenced
to death, recommended to mercy on account
of your excellent character, and are finally
transported for life.

In five years the man who really committed
the crime discovers himself by confession,
and the Home Ofiice is put to the
official trouble of sending out Her Majesty's
gracious pardon all the way to Hobart Town,
in search of you, the innocent and unfortunate
Mr. Emanuel Milkyway. The pardon
arrives,—the Pardon, bear in mind, Mr.
Milkyway. You are probably working in
chains, or under some little difficulties of
the kind, for, of course, you cannot expect to
get on as well as the professional convicts.
How should you, without the experience and
information which they have to guide them?
Emanuel Milkyway, you gladly receive the
welcome missive, wherein and whereby you
are solemnly and graciously pardoned for
the grievous wrong and injustice which have
been inflicted upon you for the benefit and
safety of society.

Your pardon establishes your claim as an
innocent man, and you are therefore entitled
to none of the privileges and benerits of the
guilty. When the jolly burglar has worked
out his period of penal servitude, and paid his
debt of punishment to offended justice, he is
provided with a decent suit of clothes, and a
small sum—not sufficient, it may be, to keep
him honest, but enough to buy a crow-bar
and a dark lantern to begin business with
again. But, Emanuel Milkway, you are a
trespasser upon the happy hunting-grounds
of guilt; you have a gracious pardon, or, in
other words, a notice to quit; you are a mistaken
culprit, a convicted impostor, an obtainer
of criminal food, of criminal shelter, and of
criminal clothing, under false pretences. The
criminal food is consumed; the criminal
shelter must be denied to you; and the
criminal clothes must be taken from you.
Get out—a naked savage at the antipodes.
Turnkeys, and governors of penal
settlements, however, after all, are men.
There are no official instructions,—you will
bear in mind, Mr. Emauuel Milkyway, that