of this on my return, I hastily packed my spoils and took train for Karlsruhe. “The account of my criminal career would be incomplete without some mention of prisons. They play a larger part in the life of the budding convict than many people realise, and contribute materially to his development. While the state turns its chief attention to the larger gaols, the smaller prisons are often sadly neglected. If these were better administered, fewer large houses of correction would be required. Here the vagrants tarry, shaping their plans; here one thief learns from another various artifices and tricks; here young offenders are won over to the criminal life. The principal evils of these small prisons undoubtedly are the promiscuous congregating together of all offenders and the absence of occupation. It is not surprising, therefore, that the time is passed in idle talk, and that the man who can relate the largest number of rascally tricks he has played should be the hero of the company. Many an inexperienced lad listens to these anecdotes and acquires a taste for the life of a sharper. When to all this is added a brutal superintendent, open to bribery, then the prison becomes a real training school for criminals. “Once in a prison at Baumholder I was locked up in company with a robber and murderer who had broken out of a Prussian gaol, and, on the road by which he was escaping, had killed a poor labourer for the sake of stealing his clothes and his small store of money. One evening this sinister individual sat brooding, his eyes glowing weirdly. Suddenly he said, ‘Hark you; when the warder comes round to-morrow he must be pulled in here; you shall hold him and I will cut his throat.’ I declined to be an accomplice in murder, and then he threatened me and looked at me so strangely that cold shivers ran down my back and I trembled like an aspen leaf. He saw my terror evidently and relented, for he offered me his brandy bottle and agreed to drop his murderous intentions if I would join with him in an attempt to escape that very night. This I was quite willing to do, but our essay came to nothing. We moved the stove and dug a hole in the floor beneath, but we presently came upon a beam with which we were not able to cope, and we were obliged to fill up the aperture with rags and bread and to move the stove back over it to escape detection.” An account of a robbery perpetrated by Kürper on a larger scale, and its sequel, may be told in conclusion of this criminal’s career.