s he boasted of having blown up Brock's
monument, and of shooting Captain Ussher in cool blood at his own door
in the night, long after all the disturbances of the insurrection were
over. Lett seemed to glory in his villanies, and was a
disgusting-looking loafer, for whose punishment the laws of the United
States have proved either too lenient or totally inadequate. This
fellow escaped when heavily ironed by jumping out of a rail car on his
way to the Auburn Penitentiary, and no doubt has many admirers.

The good farmer told me that he had been to see Auburn, and that there
was a little boy confined there for setting fire to a barn. He was
only eleven years of age, and had been hired for half a dollar by a
ruffian to do the deed.

But Auburn (what a misnomer for a penitentiary establishment, enough
to make poor Goldsmith shiver in his shroud!) is not the only
penitentiary in America where children expiate crime. Kingston in
Canada can show several examples, among others, three brothers; and it
appears to me that a better system is required in both countries. A
house of correction for such juvenile offenders would surely be better
than to mix them in labour with the hardened villains of a
penitentiary. It is, in fact, punishing thought before it has time to
discriminate, and the consequence is that these children return youths
to the same place, and when they again leave it as youths, they return
as men, for their minds are then callous.

The penitentiary system in Canada is undergoing a strict trial.

It will surprise my readers to state that, in an agricultural country,
where the manners of the people are still very primitive, where
education is still backward, and civilization slowly advancing, out of
a population of about 1,200,000, scattered widely in the woods, there
should be so large a proportion as twenty women, and five hundred men,
in the Kingston Penitentiary; for, as education and civilization
advance, and large towns grow up, new wants arise, and evil
communication corrupts good manners, so that the proportion of great
crimes between an old and a new country is much in favour always of
the latter.

Recent discoveries of the police in Montreal have shown that _hells_
of the most atrocious character, and one in imitation of Crockford's,
as far as its inferior means would go, have been found out.

At Kingston a most wretched establishment of the same nature has
recently been broken up, and at Toronto gr