and a grossly exaggerated and trumped-up charge, I gleaned from the facts that came out at his trial that he had rifled the contents of a small shop in the City Road, and that when the old woman who lived on the premises had ventured to remonstrate, that Mike had marked his sense of such an unjustifiable proceeding by half throttling her, and eventually making away “for a little season.” He assured me, however, it was “nothing,” adding, however, that as it was his fourth conviction, he quite expected penal servitude. He informed me also that he had written an elaborate defence, which he proposed reading to the judge and jury. This defence he insisted on showing me, and I am bound to say that a more damning document, or one more capable of hanging a man, I never saw; but luck and circumstances happily (for him) prevented him carrying out his intention of reading it, and Mike by the omission got off with two years’ hard labour. Mr. Rose, who was about four-feet-four in his stockings, communicated to me, amongst other interesting facts, that he was a volunteer, and I could not help realising on various occasions after he had been performing violent exercise in my cell, that there was some truth in the adage that “a Rose by any name would smell as sweet.” Mike, in short, was a character, and whether in chapel, where he apparently led the choir and knew every response by heart, or in the prison, where he appeared _au courant_ with everything and everybody, I found him a most useful neighbour, invariably obliging and respectful, and willing to turn his hand to anything. CHAPTER IX. A PRIVATE EXECUTION.