edings
were wound up by a short lecture on some scientific subject. I fear
there is not much good done in our convict schools. Teaching, or trying
to teach, men ranging from thirty to eighty years of age, who are
determined not to learn, or at least so careless about the matter that
they never can learn, seems to me a waste of public money. Young men
sometimes learn a good deal of French, arithmetic, &c., in prison, but
it is not at the school, but from their fellow prisoners that they
receive such instruction.

My Sunday routine differed from that of the other days of the week,
chiefly in having chapel-going substituted for work, and being allowed
to be in bed an hour longer in the morning.

Shortly after taking up my abode in the twenty-four-bedded room, the
diet was changed, and this was the cause of much noise among the
convicts. The day fixed for the alteration was a Sunday. The former
Sunday's dinner consisted of soup, mutton, and potatoes. The new Sunday
dinner was dry bread and four ounces of bad cheese. On being served
with this, the prisoners began cursing and swearing, and calling the
head officials all the bad names they could think of: "This is what
they call Christianity, is it, the ---- hypocrites? Starving a man on
Sundays above all days, and then taking us up to that chapel to tell us
about mercy and forgiveness and loving our neighbours! This is the way
to reform us and make us better, is it?--By jingo! I will make somebody
pay for all this yet. I'll not get my next bit for nothing," &c., &c.
Such was the burden of the conversation on this and succeeding Sunday
afternoons. To force men to go to hear the Word of God preached when
their hearts are full of evil thoughts and their mouths full of curses
is far from being a likely mode of leading men to Christ. The
chaplain's position in the pulpit used to strike me as being something
like that of a farmer sowing good seed broad-cast over a field so
overgrown with tares, that the seed could never reach the soil. If he
attempts to clear the soil of the weeds, to win the hearts of the
prisoners, he finds the whole system of prison discipline arrayed
against him. That discipline breeds and encourages the growth of every
evil passion in the heart of man, and he, the chaplain, is part of that
system: he lives by it, and he is not allowed to interfere with it, at
all events he never did so. When prisoners complained to him of some
injustice or some cruelty, they