Another, but a still more melancholy case, was pointed out to me. I asked the physician, Dr. Maresca, if there were any foreigners in the jail, and he told me there were several from Germany and France; and one, an Englishman, who had been confined some years before for an attempt at fraud, and who, between chagrin and disease, was now dying in the hospital. I went to see him, and found him in bed in the last feeble stage of consumption. His story was a very sad one--his name was Clarke, he seemed about thirty-five or thirty-six years of age, and had come over with his wife to seek for work as a machine maker at one of the engine factories in Ghent. He was disappointed--he could get no adequate employment--he saw his young wife and his little children perishing from hunger in a strange land, and, in an evil hour, he forged a document for some trifling sum to procure them bread. He was detected, tried and condemned to five years’ imprisonment in the _maison de force_. What became of his family he no longer knew; they had, perhaps, returned to England, but he could not tell. The physician told me that his conduct had all along been most excellent, so much so, that the government reduced the term of his imprisonment from five years to four, and he had now but eighteen months to remain. But he was dying, and of a broken heart through sorrow and mortification. The physician had tried to obtain a further reduction of his term; but it was not thought prudent at the time to accede to his representations, and now it was too late to renew the application. Dr. M. thought he would now be liberated if the application were repeated, but it was more humane, he said, to leave him as he was, as he had every attention he required; the hospital was comfortable, and the rules of the prison had all been relaxed in his favour, so that he had books and every indulgence granted to him, and a few weeks would soon release him from all his sorrows. Poor fellow! I hardly knew whether he seemed gratified or grieved by our visit; but his situation, surrounded by foreigners, to whose very language he was a stranger, far from home and England, and without a friend or relation to watch his dying bed was a very touching one, and it was rendered, perhaps, more so, by the very sympathy and kindness which seemed to be felt for him by all around him.