biographers to China or Morocco, and omit to supply them with return tickets. I have lately read a book connected with penal servitude, by an anonymous writer, in which this innocent lamb is whining throughout of his hardship in being compelled to herd with criminals; and it says a great deal for his imitative capacity that he should so naturally and so thoroughly have adopted the almost universal “injured innocence” tactics of the habitual criminal. One great nuisance at all prisons is the almost universal habit that prisoners have of protesting their innocence; they protest it so often to everybody on every possible occasion, that they eventually begin to believe that they really are innocent. I found these guileless creatures great bores; indeed I am (I am convinced) well within the mark when I assert that there were only about three-and-twenty guilty persons besides myself amongst the fifteen hundred prisoners in Coldbath Fields. This compulsory herding with innocent burglars is a great trial, and one that never enters into the calculation of a judge. A short drive at a good pace on this early December morning brought us to the gates of Coldbath Fields Prison; and as I stepped out, I could not help recalling Dante’s famous line— “All hope abandon ye who enter here.” It only proves how apt one is to form erroneous ideas from first impressions. I was never more mistaken in my life. CHAPTER XIII. “CORPULENCY.” From my birth up to within the past twelve months I have had the misfortune to be afflicted with one of the most dreadful diseases that flesh is heir to. It is one that entails suffering both to body and mind, and from which a vast proportion of humanity suffers in a more or less aggravated form. It is a slow and insidious disease that never decreases of its own accord, but on the contrary develops itself with one’s increasing years as surely as the most virulent cancer. It has this advantage, however, over this latter dreadful complaint—that it invariably yields to treatment conscientiously applied; but it has also this disadvantage, that, whereas other afflictions invariably enlist the sympathy of our fellow-creatures, this one never fails to be jeered and hooted at and turned into ridicule by the coarse and vulgar of our species. This complaint, surprising as it may appear, is held in contempt by most of the faculty, and I doubt whether it has ever received baptism in the English or any other pharmacopoeia. I will therefore without further preamble state, for the benefit of afflicted humanity, that it is called “obesity.” In the course of my remarks I may be led into the use of what may appear strong expressions; and if I should unwittingly offend the susceptibilities of any fat reader, he or she will, I trust, forgive it, as coming from one who has, as it were, gone through the mill, and been subjected to the like ridicule and the like temptations as themselves.