ok, in which are entered the
details of each prison case with which it is dealing. Awful enough
some of them were.

I remember two that caught my eye as I turned its pages. The first was
that of a man who had gone for a walk with his wife, from whom he was
separated, cut her head off, and thrown it into a field. The second
was that of another man, or brute beast, who had taken his child by
the heels and dashed out its brains against the fireplace. It may be
wondered why these gentle creatures still adorn the world. The
explanation seems to be that in Scotland there is a great horror of
capital punishment, which is but rarely inflicted.

My recollection is that the Officer who visited them had hopes of the
permanent reformation of both these men; or, at any rate, that there
were notes in his book to this effect.

I saw many extraordinary cases in this Glasgow Refuge, some of whom
had come there through sheer misfortune. One had been a medical man
who, unfortunately, was left money and took to speculating on the
Stock Exchange. He was a very large holder of shares in a South
African mine, which he bought at 1s. 6d. These shares now stand at L7;
but, unhappily for him, his brokers dissolved partnership, and neither
of them would carry over his account. So it was closed down just at
the wrong time, with the result that he lost everything, and finally
came to the streets. He never drank or did anything wrong; it was, as
he said, 'simply a matter of sheer bad luck.'

Another was a Glasgow silk merchant, who made a bad debt of L3,000
that swamped him. Afterwards he became paralysed, but recovered. He
had been three years cashier of this Shelter.

Another arrived at the Shelter in such a state that the Officer in
charge told me he was obliged to throw his macintosh round him to hide
his nakedness. He was an engineer who took a public-house, and helped
himself freely to his stock-in-trade, with the result that he became a
frightful drunkard, and lost L1,700. He informed me that he used to
consume no less than four bottles of whisky a day, and suffered from
delirium tremens several times. In the Shelter--I quote his own
words--'I gave my heart to God, and after that all desire for drink
and wrongdoing' (he had not been immaculate in other ways) 'gradually
left me. From 1892 I had been a drunkard. After my conversion, in less
than three weeks I ceased to have any desire for drink.'

This man became night-watchman in the She