"We are sorry to learn that the forgery of notes of various banks is carried on by prisoners at the Depôt, and that they find means to throw them into circulation by the assistance of profligate people who frequent the market. The eagerness of the prisoners to obtain cash is very great, and as they retain all they procure they have drained the place almost entirely of silver, so that it has become a matter of difficulty to get change of a note. "Last week a woman coming from the Market at the Depôt was searched by an order of Captain Moriarty, when there was found about her person pieces of base money in imitation of Bank tokens (of which the prisoners are suspected to have been the fabricators), to the amount of £5 17s. After undergoing examination, the woman was committed to gaol." [30] Here quoted from Abell, "Prisoners of War in Britain." The Perth prisoners earned for themselves a very bad name, for not only did they counterfeit bank-notes, copies of which are still to be found by collectors, but they fell to all sorts of dishonest practices. A favourite ruse of theirs was to bargain with a customer and then offer to wrap up the goods which were about to change hands. The wrapping-up process was completed out of the unwary purchaser's view, but instead of enclosing the curio they included a lump of clay or piece of wood of similar shape. If the customer came back to complain, the seller was seldom found, and even when he was discovered it took a deal of threatening and verbal eloquence to obtain redress from the defaulter, whose one security was the iron railings which separated him from the outside world. The prisoners at Dartmoor also made knick-knacks, but the Governor here forbade the sale of woollen mittens, gloves, straw hats or bonnets, plaited straw, shoes, and articles made out of prison stores. At Stapleton, outside Bristol, the bootmakers of the neighbourhood complained of the sale of shoes in the prison market The prison-made article, however, was usually more a thing of ornamentation than of use, and so the bootmakers' complaint seems somewhat unwarranted. At Liverpool, the Frenchmen made trinkets, crucifixes, card-boxes, toys, snuff-boxes, horsehair rings, and hair watch-chains, using their own hair in the manufacture of the two latter articles. At the Greenland Valleyfield prison, the making of straw into strawplait was for a while a profitable pastime, as the following passage shows:[31]--