moustache, and oval face, he looked at times delicately and gaily young, and then appeared quite old, decrepit, full of sorrow, pressing his folded arms to his breast. </p> <p> As he remained silent I felt bound to ask: </p> <p> &ldquo;Well! And how did it end?&rdquo; </p> <p> &ldquo;Deportation to Cayenne,&rdquo; he answered. </p> <p> He seemed to think that somebody had given the plot away. As he was keeping watch in the back street, bag in hand, he was set upon by the police. &ldquo;These imbeciles,&rdquo; had knocked him down without noticing what he had in his hand. He wondered how the bomb failed to explode as he fell. But it didn&rsquo;t explode. </p> <p> &ldquo;I tried to tell my story in court,&rdquo; he continued. &ldquo;The president was amused. There were in the audience some idiots who laughed.&rdquo; </p> <p> I expressed the hope that some of his companions had been caught, too. He shuddered slightly before he told me that there were two&mdash;Simon, called also Biscuit, the middle-aged fitter who spoke to him in the street, and a fellow of the name of Mafile, one of the sympathetic strangers who had applauded his sentiments and consoled his humanitarian sorrows when he got drunk in the cafe. </p> <p> &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he went on, with an effort, &ldquo;I had the advantage of their company over there on St. Joseph&rsquo;s Island, amongst some eighty or ninety other convicts. We were all classed as dangerous.&rdquo; </p> <p> St. Joseph&rsquo;s Island is the prettiest of the Iles de Salut. It is rocky and green, with shallow ravines, bushes, thickets, groves of mango-trees, and many feathery palms. Six warders armed with revolvers and carbines are in charge of the convicts kept there. </p> <p> An eight-oared galley keeps up the communication in the daytime, across a channel a quarter of a mile wide, with the Ile Royale, where there is a military post. She makes the first trip at six in the morning. At four in the afternoon her service is over, and she is then hauled up into a little dock on the Ile Royale and a sentry put over her and a few smaller boats. From that time till next morning the island of St. Joseph remains cut off from the rest of the world, with the warders patrolling in turn the path from the warders&rsquo; house to the convict huts, and a multitude of sharks patrolling the waters all round. </p> <p> Under these circumstances the convicts planned a mutiny. Such a thing had never been known in the penitentiary&rsquo;s history before. But their plan was not without some possibility of success. The warders were to be taken by surprise and murdered during the night. Their arms would enable the