An author of sensitive organization has always a difficulty in treating the subject of prison life. If he avoids details, the critics do not ascribe it to delicacy, but to incompetence; if, on the other hand, he enters into them, they nudge the elbow of the public, and hint that this particular phase of human experience is his specialty--that he "ought to know," because he has been "through the mill" himself. This is not kind, of course; but the expression, "a little more than kin and less than kind," is exceedingly applicable to the critic in relation to his humble brother, the author. We will take a middle course, then, and exhibit only just so much of Cross Key as may be seen in a "justice's visit." Twenty years ago, the system of treatment of prisoners before trial incarcerated in her Majesty's jails was not so uniform as it now is. In some they were permitted few privileges not enjoyed by the convicts themselves; in others a considerable difference was made between the two classes. The establishment at Cross Key leaned to the side of indulgence. Its inmates who were awaiting their trial were allowed to wear their own clothes; to write letters to their friends without supervision (though not without the suspicion of it on their own part); and to mingle together for some hours in a common room, where that unbroken silence which pervades all our modern Bastiles, and is perhaps their most terrible feature, was not insisted upon. In this common room Richard Yorke was sitting on the afternoon following his incarceration. The principal meal of the day had been just concluded, and himself and his fellow-guests were brooding moodily over their troubles. The platters, the block-tin knives, so rounded that the most determined self-destroyer could never job himself with them into Hades, and the metal mugs had been removed, and their places on the narrow deal table were occupied by a few periodicals of a somewhat depressing character, though "devoted to the cultivation of quiet cheerfulness," and by a leaden inkstand much too large to be swallowed. The prisoners--upon the ground, perhaps, of not needing the wings of liberty for any other purpose--were expected to furnish (from them) their own pens. There were but half a dozen of these unfortunates; all, with two exceptions, were of the same type--that of the ordinary agricultural criminal. Ignorant, slouching, dogged, they might have fired a rick, or killed a keeper, or even--sacrilegious but unthinking boors--have shot a great man's pheasant. They did not make use of their privileges of conversation beyond a muttered word or two, but stared stupidly at the pictures in the magazines, wondering (as well they might) at the benevolent faces of the landlords, clergymen, and all persons in authority therein portrayed, or perhaps not wondering at them at all, but rather pondering whether Bet and the children had gone into "the House" or not by this