A well-authenticated anecdote gives an even more powerful illustration of the excessive wretchedness to which young persons without friends or protectors are, in thousands and tens of thousands, reduced. The master of a Ragged School having occasion to lecture a boy of this class, pointed out to him the consequences of a perseverance in the career of crime he was pursuing; and to enforce his precepts the stronger, painted in strong colours the punishments he was earning in this life, and the torments in that to come. 'Well,' said the boy, 'I don't think it can be worse than the torments in this life.' It is melancholy to know that it is chiefly the novices in crime who have to endure the sharpest privations and miseries. As youths grow more dexterous in their illicit calling, they have, as a matter of course, better success. In lodging-houses and casual wards they learn the elements of their illicit vocation; and it is not till they have passed a few months in one of our prisons that their education in crime is complete. Despite the 'silent-system,' and the palatial accommodation of our modern prisons, detention in them is still productive of the worst results. Although, by a recent act, the power of summary conviction has been much extended to police magistrates, so as to obviate the evil of long detention, other and greater evils, which need not be specified here, have sprung up. To show what efficient instruction in infamy those already prepared to receive its lessons is afforded in prisons, we need only instance a fact, related in the Pentonville Prison Report by the chaplain, relative to a child of decent parentage, and not, as one may suppose, so open as many to bad impressions:--'A very young boy, seven years of age, was brought in, charged, in company with other two boys somewhat older, with stealing some iron-piping from the street. The little fellow--it was the first time he had ever been in such a place--cried bitterly all the afternoon of the Saturday; but by the Monday morning, the exhortations of his companions, and their sneers at his softness, had reconciled him to his situation; and the eldest of the three was teaching him to pick pockets, practising his skill on almost all the other prisoners. His mother came to see him in the forenoon, and the boy was again overwhelmed with grief. Again his companions jeered him, calling him by certain opprobrious epithets in use amongst such characters, and in a short time the boy was pacified, and romping merrily with his associates.'