exposed to his cruelty but reviles his memory. I once knew the convict
who gave the signal for his murder. He was sentenced to death, but was
reprieved and served a long term of imprisonment. The murder happened
forty-one years ago, yet to this day the old convict commends the
murder as a just act of retribution, and when he narrates the story he
tells you with bitter passion that the "Colonel's dead, and, if there's
a hell, he's frizzling there yet."

Captain Foster Fyans, a former Governor of Norfolk Island Convict
Settlement, spent the last years of his life in the town I belong to,
Geelong, in Victoria. The cruelties imposed on the convicts under his
charge were justified, he declared, by the brutalised character of the
prisoners. On one occasion, he used to tell, a band of convicts
attempted to escape from the Island; but their attempt was frustrated by
the guard. The twelve convicts implicated in the outbreak were put on
their trial, found guilty, and sentenced to death by strangulation, as
hanging really was in those days. Word was sent to headquarters in
Sydney, and instructions were asked for to carry the sentence into
effect. The laconic order was sent back from Sydney to "hang half of
them." The Captain acknowledged the humour of the despatch, though it
placed him in a difficulty. Which half should he hang, when all were
equally guilty? In his pleasant way the Captain used to tell how he
acted in the dilemma. He went round to the twelve condemned wretches,
and asked each man separately if, being under sentence of death, he
desired a reprieve or wished for death. As luck would have it, of the
twelve men, six pleaded for life and six as earnestly prayed that they
might be sent to the scaffold. So the Captain hanged the six men who
wished to live, and spared the six men who prayed for death to release
them from their awful misery. This is an absolutely true story, which I
have heard from men to whom the Captain himself told it. Besides, it
bears on its face the impress of truth. And yet we are accustomed to
speak of the Chinese as centuries behind us in civilisation and
humanity.

I went to two opium-poisoning cases in Tali, both being cases of
attempted suicide. The first was that of an old man living not _at_ the
South Gate as the messenger assured us, who feared to discourage us if
he told the truth, but more than a mile beyond it. On our way we bought
in the street some sulphate of copper, and a large dose