one appropriated
to the men, the other to the women. A few of the men were at work
making shoes and baskets, but most were sitting and lying about in the
sun, smoking cigarettes and talking together in knots, the young ones
hard at work taking lessons in villainy from the older hands; just the
old story.

Offenders of all orders, from drunkards and vagrants up to highway
robbers and murderers, all were mixed indiscriminately together. But we
should remember that in England twenty years ago it was usual for
prisons to be such places as this; and even now, in spite of model
prisons and severe discipline, the miserable results of our
prison-system show, as plainly as can be, that when we have caught our
criminal we do not in the least know how to reform him, now that our
colonists have refused him the only chance he ever had.

It is bad enough to mix together these men under the most favourable
circumstances for corrupting one another. Every man must come out worse
than he went in; but this wrong is not so great as that which the
untried prisoners suffer in being forced into the society of condemned
criminals, while their trials drag on from session to session, through
the endless technicalities and quibbles of Spanish law.

We made rather a curious observation in this prison. When one enters
such a place in Europe, one expects to see in a moment, by the faces
and demeanour of the occupants, that most of them belong to a special
criminal class, brought up to a life of crime which is their only
possible career, belonging naturally to police-courts and prisons,
herding together when out of prison in their own districts and their
own streets, and carefully avoided by the rest of society. You may know
a London thief when you see him; he carries his profession in his face
and in the very curl of his hair. Now in this prison there was nothing
of the kind to be seen. The inmates were brown Indians and half-bred
Mexicans, appearing generally to belong to the poorest class, but just
like the average of the people in the streets outside. As my companion
said, "If these fellows are thieves and murderers, so are our servants,
and so is every man in a serape we meet in the streets, for all we can
tell to the contrary." There was positively nothing at all peculiar
about them.

If they had been all Indians we might have been easily deceived.
Nothing can be more true than Humboldt's observation that the Indian
face differs so much fr