and carefully to avoid the refreshments supplied from the cat’s meat houses in the neighbourhood. With these slight digressions I shall proceed to a description of the routine at the “House of Detention,” with its rules and regulations and privileges, and the impressions they conveyed to me; and I cannot do better than impress on the reader that this book makes no pretensions to literary merit, but must be regarded rather as a journal of facts, whose principle claim is based on their having been written by a man who is probably as well known as any in England. I ask no praise, I’m equally oblivious to abuse; criticism I’m absolutely indifferent to, being convinced that either my notoriety, my popularity, my identity, or unpopularity, will procure me readers far in excess of any book of greater merit; and it is a consolation to feel that my friends will be glad that I got through some months with a degree of comfort never before paralleled, and my enemies (male and especially female) will be chagrined at discovering that “Imprisonment with Hard Labour” in my case meant kindness from first to last hardly credible, absolutely devoid of any labour at all, and accompanied with luxuries as regards eating and drinking that could not have been surpassed had I been stopping at a first-class hotel and paying thirty shillings a day for board and lodging. Many apparent contradictions may moreover suggest themselves, but taken in the light of a diary, these contradictory views must be regarded as reflecting circumstances as they appeared to me from time to time under various phases. Suffice it to say that I have carefully avoided exaggeration, that everything I narrate can be fully substantiated, and may be unhesitatingly accepted as the experiences of a man endowed with an average amount of brains, who kept his eyes wide open, and who had opportunities given him that no man ever had before, whether higher or lower in the social or criminal scale, of seeing a vast amount of the “dark side of nature.” In my innocence I once fancied I had seen a good deal, and knew a lot; but the following narrative will prove that I was a very babe and suckling, before I became a “Government ward.” Heaven forbid that anyone should purchase his experience at such a price; nevertheless, on the principle that has guided me through life of trying to see everything and do everything, I can only attempt to justify my escapades by endorsing the theory (slightly altered) of the immortal Voltaire, that a man who would go through what I have is “_un fois un philosophe_, _mais deux fois un criminel déterminé_.” CHAPTER III. “SETTLING DOWN.”