walls were smeared with filth and dabbed with porridge; the plank bed was torn up, and plaster and brickwork removed: a terrible wreck, an incredible performance, and all the work of two hands, handcuffed behind and strapped, and surrounded by every precaution that official ingenuity could suggest. This final escapade materially assisted the magisterial finding as to the extent of the maniac’s “cure,” and he was again consigned to Hanwell. Another lunatic of a different type was an inmate of the convalescent ward, a harmless, inoffensive creature, that had been flogged out of his senses. His physique proclaimed him incapable of doing bodily harm to a calf. He was not more than five feet high, with a fore-arm like a robin’s thigh, and the receding forehead, sunken eye, and conical skull associated with imbecility; but he had once “threatened” a warder, a hulking, round-shouldered old woman, that might have squeezed the life out of him without turning a hair, and discipline demanded he should be reported, and the visiting justices sentenced him to be flogged. From that day he never spoke, and would sit for hours without moving; suddenly he would break out into an immoderate fit of laughter, to be immediately followed by a paroxysm of grief, and, laying his head on the table, would sob like a child. Nothing appeared likely to restore his naturally limited intellect, and the country will be at the expense of keeping this “dangerous criminal” for another twelvemonth, who would be infinitely more at home at Earlswood Asylum for Idiots. A perfect child occupied another of these hospital cells, an incorrigible young scamp of about fourteen, that nothing seemed capable of taming. Everything within reach he proceeded to destroy, and clothes supplied him in the morning were in shreds at night. He, too, was constantly handcuffed; he refused to eat, and for a week nothing passed his lips. One day, on his door being opened, he was found suspended by a bed-strap from the bell-handle: another second, and life would have been extinct. For this he was taken before the visiting justices and birched. It had, however, no deterrent effect, and up to the time of his release he remained the same incorrigible young ruffian. There is no hope for such a lad; his future is bound to be a repetition of many instances I saw amongst the adults, who had commenced a career of crime with birchings, followed by three and five years in a reformatory, and ending with imprisonment and eventually penal servitude. Another companion that was the source of occasional anxiety, had been an inmate of a lunatic asylum, and though usually quiet, was subject to extraordinary fits. The first intimation of one coming on was a demoniacal groan, and in an incredibly short time a space was cleared round him. It had been found, indeed, that nothing could arrest the first paroxysm, and on the “band beginning to play,” a