daughter if she was not glad to have her mother
as a companion?

"Ye— es, lady," was the hesitating answer;
"it's a kind of change, but"— with a little
impulsive dash— "she do make a great mess and
litter, to be sure!"

They were quiet half-stultified simple-minded
beings, whom poverty and starvation had
reduced far below the natural sensibility of
humanity; but they were not murderesses.

Then there was " Granny Collis," the mother
of the prison in a way, above seventy years of
age, who committed petty thefts that she might
be sent to Millbank: having no friends out of
doors, and disliking the workhouse, where they
were quarrelsome and noisy, and "not used to
her ways," as they were at Millbank. Collis
was a small, spare, pretty old woman, with a
chirping voice, and a merry way, good tempered,
obedient, fond of her Bible, and sincerely
religious. She did her small sins for the sole
purpose of being sent to jail, where she was taken
care of, and treated kindly, and where she found
a happier home, and a more liberal one, than in
the union. She wanted to die in jail, she said; it
was her only place of refuge, and she did not care
to leave it; and so, when she was discharged,
she committed a petty theft again— after having
honestly tried the workhouse, and found it
would not answer— and came tottering back to
Millbank, where she did die at last, in all peace
and serenity, before her time had fully expired.
These were two instances of innocent prisoners—
for poor old Granny Collis was innocent in a way
— where the fault lay with the hard ruling of
society, and the bitter teaching of poverty,
rather than with their own innate depravity, as
with so many others.

Lydia Camblin, the "golden-haired, rosy-
faced child, of slight, almost fragile figure,"
looked as if fresh from the holy keeping of a
mother's love. Her sudden appearance in
the ward, with her prison gown of
preposterous size pinned up ronnd her, and her
fair child's face looking so strangely from
beneath the great prison cap, awoke such a burst
of womanly feeling among even the worst
criminals of the ward. "My God, look here!"
cried one woman, clasping her hands, while
deep convulsive sobs broke out on all sides.
"It's a shame! it's an awful shame! She
should not have been let in here!" they cried,
and the child was obliged to be passed on
quickly to her cell, that the excitement of
the women might calm down. Yet she was
one of the most painful instances of
premature vice and depravity that could have
been found. She "might have been an old
prison bird of forty years of age, for her coolness,
presence of mind, and craft. She was terribly
old in thought, even for a woman thrice her age;
was hard to repress, and difficult to restrain.
From her lips it has been the matron's
unpleasant lot to hear the foul and obscene words which
escape, in excited moments, from the most
unprincipled of prisoners. One would believe, on
hearing her, and in looking at the pale
child-like face confronting the observer, that she was
born bad, or that, if there were any parents
whom she could recollect, they must have been
'God and Heaven reversed to her.'" What an
awful account lies somewhere, that this young
fair child should have been trained up to be the
frightfully depraved being she was— a being
doomed to inevitable ruin, going down to
perdition.

Many prisoners are very troublesome, because
entailing extra attention and attendance on the
part of the matrons, and yet we, who read of
their tricks, and are not irritated by their personal
reference to ourselves, can only laugh at them,
as humorous antics and pardonable freaks of
fancy. There was McWilliams— well, to be
sure she was marked Incorrigible in the
Director's book of characters— who was always
being sent to the "dark" for smashing windows
and breaking prison rules, but she was a queer
madcap rather than thoroughly bad. One day
they heard shrieks of laughter issuing from her
cell. Now, prisoners in a solitary cell don't
laugh for nothing; so there was a hurrying to
McWilliams to know what was the matter, and
why she had laughed? "Nothing particular,
ma'am— only— oh dear! it does look so funny
— I have been cutting the broom's hair. It's
much too long, miss, according to the rules!"
And there, sure enough, was her new broom with
all its bristles cut close to the stump, and done
for, as a sweeper, for ever! Punished for this
freak, her next act was to walk to chapel without
shoes or stockings, amusing herself and the rest
of the prisoners by thrusting out her bare feet
and legs during the service, until the giggling of
her companions betrayed her to the indignant
matron.

Jarvis was another troublesome inmate.
Jarvis had a fancy for getting her head into
difficulty; wherever there was a square hole
large enough for a head to go through, there
was Jarvis in a self-made pillory, with her silly
defying face turned aggravatingly towards you.
In the doors of the refractory cells is a small
trap for passing food through to the prisoners.
If by chance this trap was opened, quick as a
jack-in-the-box Jarvis's head would be thrust
through, and the matron must sit down and
keep close watch on her for hours and hours
together, to see that she did not strangle
herself. Sometimes the guards were able to thrust
the head gently back again and close the trap, and
then Jarvis would fling herself on her back and
kick the floor with her heels violently for twenty-
four hours at least, and without a moment's
cessation. She was called "crying Jarvis," and
was not of quite sound intellect. Indeed, many
of the criminals are not quite sane:—  a larger
proportion than the world, eager to keep up the
wholesome theory of moral responsibility, would
like to acknowledge. Celestina Sommer, who
murdered her child under circumstances
peculiarly cruel and revolting, and whose sentence of
death was commuted to penal servitude for life,
would not have been pronounced sane by Dr.
Conolly at any time of her career. A pale