Hard Lines--A Boaster--A Veneered Flunkey--Billy Treacle's Aunt Dies Again--Frederic Barton and His Vain Petitions--I Give Him a Pointer--His Inherited Fortune Fake--Surreptitious Mail Route--Warders as Letter Carriers. 463 CHAPTER XLVIII. Sixteen-Thousand-Acre Tea Plantation in India and Sixty Thousand Pounds Imaginary Inheritance--Barton Becomes a Great Man--The Plot Thickens--Letters from London--Smith Discharged--Petition for Barton--Smith Presents It at Home Office--Home Secretary Swallows the Bait--Barton's Triumphant Release--His Imaginary Fortune Does Not Materialize. 466 CHAPTER XLIX. Tantalizing the Home Secretary--Refused a Letter Sheet--Petition the Home Office for One--Sarcasm About Barton's Release on My Sub-Rosa Petition--Good Conduct Fails--Feigned Wealth Wins Freedom for Barton--Apropos Quotation from Goethe--Sir Vernon Harcourt and His Opinion--I Tread Dangerous Ground. 471 CHAPTER L. Niblo Clark--The Mysterious Three R's--His Characteristic Verses--My Tenth Anniversary at Chatham--All Efforts Fail and Fifteen Years Gone Forever--Despairing When Good News Comes--My Sister in England--George Freed--Hope Returns and Abides--George Gets James G. Blaine, J. Russell and Others to Intercede--Fresh Failures--Home Secretary Matthews Won't--George and My Sister Will--Which Will Wear the Other Out--George and Sister Win--Night and Gloom in My Cell--These Walls Have Frowned on Me for Twenty Years--Warder's Tramps on Stone Corridor Arouse Me--Door Opens--"You Are Free"--First Sight of Stars in Twenty Years--I Shout, 'Twas Like a Prayer: "God Is Good." 478 NOTE TO THE PUBLIC The Hon. Lyman J. Gage, Dr. Funk and hundreds of others have said that my book should be put at a price which would place it within the reach of every young man, etc. Hitherto, it has been sold by subscription at $3.50, $5 and $10 per copy--the five editions printed having been easily sold at those prices. Notwithstanding the thousands of friends their circulation has made, I did not care to have my family name go any further in this connection than financial needs required in working for the release of the men still undergoing life sentences in English prisons. At last, however, certain influence causes me to let it go in the revised and improved form here presented, and may it prove as valuable and engrossing to the general public as it has to 20,000 subscribers to former editions. GEORGE BIDWELL. CHAPTER I. HAD THERE BEEN WISDOM THERE? We lived in South Brooklyn, near to old No. 13, the Degraw Street Public School. To that I was sent, and there got all the education I was ever fated to have at any school, except the school of life and experience.