imitated her call; the mouse came out on to the
table; the woman caught it and bit its tail off.
Poor Seymour's loyal wrath knew no bounds.
Her passionate despair at the indignity to which
her friend had been subjected was almost tragic
in its intensity. Another woman tamed a
sparrow; but both "my friend" and "Bobby"
came to untimely ends, for "Alma," the prison
cat, ate the one, and the other dashed into
the lighted gas, singed his wings, and died that
night, with the woman wringing her hands in
grief over his body. It was some months before
Seymour recovered the loss of "her friend," and
she might be seen in the evenings sitting crying
in her cell, unable to turn away her mind from
her great sorrow. Another woman made her
little poem out of a daisy, which was the only
thing that touched her or brought tears to her
eyes. She was one of the sullen and obdurate
class; but the little daisy, surreptitiously picked
in the yard and laid before her on the cell table,
broke her down; and the matron, looking
quietly through the grating, saw the fierce dark
sullen woman bury her head in her folded arms,
and burst into a passion of tears at the mute
witness of that little flower. It was a strange
travesty of Picciola.

It is a harder task to manage female prisoners
than male, says the prison matron. They are
more impulsive, more individual, more
unreasonable and excitable, than men; will not act in
concert, and cannot be disciplined in masses.
Each wants personal and peculiar treatment, so
that the duties fall much more heavily on the
matrons than on the warders: the matrons
having thus to deal with units, not aggregates,
and having to adapt themselves to each
individual case, instead of simply obeying certain
fixed laws and making others obey them, as in
the prisons for males. On this account the prison
matron urges one reform much needed, namely,
a larger staff of matrons and female officers. At
present they are too few, consequently are over-
worked, and often obliged to give up their
situations, broken down before their time. They
suffer almost as severely as the criminals, and
lead almost as terrible lives of monotony and
confinement. For they, too, have gone to jail,
with this sole difference, that they are innocent,
not guilty prisoners, and are doing the work of
law and good order, not of vice and
demoralisation. Yet their case is a hard one,
and to be looked into.

TWO DOG-SHOWS.

It has been said that every individual member
of the human race bears in his outward form a
resemblance to some animal; and I really
believe that (you, the reader, and I, the writer of
these words, excepted) this is very generally
the case. Everybody surely can with ease point
out among his friends some who resemble owls,
hawks, giraffes, kangaroos, terriers, goats,
monkeys. Do we not all know people who are
like sheep, pigs, cats, or parrots; the last being,
especially in military neighbourhoods, a very
common type indeed? Let any one pay a visit
to the Zoological Gardens with this theory of
resemblances in his mind, and see how
continually he will be reminded of his friends. Among
the aviaries, before the dens, in the monkey-
house, and even in the serpent department, he
will find himself en pays de connaissance at
every turn.

But what is more remarkable is, that there
is one single tribe of animals, and that the
most mixed up with man of all, whose different
members recal to us constantly, different types
of humanity. It is impossible to see a large
collection of dogs together, without being
continually reminded of the countenances of people
you have met or known; of their countenances,
and of their ways.

In that great canine competition which drew
crowds, some week or two ago, to Islington,
there were furnished many wonderful
opportunities for moralising on humanity. It was
difficult to keep the fancy within bounds. With
regard to the prize dogs for instance (to plunge
into the subject at once), was there not
something of the quiet triumph of human success
about their aspect? Was there not something
of human malice and disappointment about the
look of the unsuccessful competitors? Was
there not a tendency in these last to turn their
backs upon the winners, and to assume an
indifference which they did not feel? There was
a certain prize retriever, and a more beautiful
animal never wagged tail. To see that creature
sitting up and looking with an air of surprise
towards the direction in which some other (and
probably unsuccessful) dogs were making an
immense noise with discontented growlings and
barkings— to see his calm expression and utter
want of sympathy— was a great sight, and the
curled-up disgust of the other retriever who had
failed, and whose position was next to that of
the prize dog, was even a greater sight. On the
whole, the winning dogs carried their honours
with calmness, and, with the exception of the
prize King Charles, the bearing of whose nose
was a thought arrogant, sustained their
triumph with modesty and forbearance. It is not
difficult to occupy the first place becomingly.
The winners of such high prizes can afford to be
quiet and unassuming. But to feel that you
can retrieve better than the prize retriever, that
you can hang on to a bull's nose better than the
prize bull-dog, that you can make yourself gene-
rally disagreeable better than the prize lap-dog,
is a worrying thought for the second class
competitor, and is apt to make him curl himself up
and snap and render himself in a variety of ways
hugely unpopular. For, it is to be supposed
that the prizes in this same dog competition were
accorded more to perfection of canine form than
to intellectual merit, there being no opportunities
of forming an estimate of a pointer's pointing,
a retriever's retrieving, a bull-dog's bullying, or
an Italian greyhound's aggravating, in the
Agricultural Hall at Islington. To take the owner's
word for the abilities of each animal would be
of course out of the question.