re to suffer. The painful
office of communicating this final intelligence to these men was
intrusted to me, and they listened to the announcement not without deep
feeling, but still with composure.

"It would be very painful for me to dwell on the closing scene. The
unhappy and guilty men were attended by the zealous chaplain of the
jail, whose earnest exhortations and instructions they most gratefully
received. The light of truth shone clearly on the past, and they felt
that their manifold lapses from the path of virtue had been the original
cause of the complicated misery they had endured. They entreated
forgiveness of all against whom they had offended, and in the last words
to their friends, were uttered grateful remembrances to Captain
Maconochie, his family, and others. At the place of execution, they
behaved with fortitude and a composure befitting the solemnity of the
occasion. Having retired from attendance upon them in their last
moments, I was startled from the painful stupor which succeeded in my
own mind, by the loud and heavy bound of the drop as it fell, and told
me that their spirits had gone to God who gave them."

Since the foregoing narrative was written, the treatment of convicts has
undergone considerable change, government having found the experiment of
transporting the worse class of criminals from New South Wales to
Norfolk Island to be a failure. The penal settlement was therefore
broken up in 1855, and convicts are now confined in different
establishments in the United Kingdom, where, without subjecting them to
absolute silence or solitude, they are separated from the contaminating
society of each other. Under the present system, it is a fixed principle
never to allow, if at all possible, the punishment--while it may be made
to any extent disagreeable--to injure either the body or the mind.

THE SOLITARY ISLANDER.

It was at the time Queen Anne began to reign, and her ships were
carrying the English flag into all seas, for commerce, for discovery, or
for war, when one of these vessels, called the _Clinque Ports_, put in
to refit at the uninhabited island of Juan Fernandez, on the west coast
of South America.

It was but a small island, though fertile and pleasant; it had not been
tilled or planted, neither had any place of shelter been built upon it,
but sometimes two or three sick sailors had been left there to recover
health, and sometimes a passing ship would put in for water, a