When Jerry and Bob were landed at Launceston, they were as unable as those who sent them were disinclined, to reflect on the difference between their being sent there, innocent, to provide an honest livelihood for themselves, and being deposited as a curse upon this new region,—both guilty and one hardened, proscribed by the old country and dreaded by the new, and prepared to baffle all the professed objects of their punishment. The guilt of these lads was distinctly referrible to indigence. Their parents could give them little wherewith to provide for their bodies, and nothing of that care and instruction which were peculiarly needful to them in their circumstances of temptation. Being thus made outcasts, they acted as outcasts; from which time it became a struggle between themselves and society which could inflict the most misery upon the other. They put society in fear, violated its rights, mocked its institutions, and helped to corrupt its yet innocent members. Society inflicted on them disgrace, bondage, and banishment; and from all this misery no good resulted, however much was proposed. The judge who pronounced sentence on Jerry and Bob told them that it was necessary to the security of society that they should be prevented from inflicting any further injury by their evil deeds.—There are two ways by which such prevention may be accomplished; one by the death, the other by the reformation, of the offender. Death was too severe a punishment for the offence of these lads; the judge must therefore have contemplated their reformation, or have thought only of England when he spoke of society. Did the law gain its object? “I say, Bob,” said Jerry one evening, when they had got the leave it is so easy to obtain to go out of bounds, and work for themselves over-hours,—“I say, do you remember what that fellow in Newgate read us about that cursed gaol where the people are mewed up as close as if they were in a school, and closer?” “What that where they are shut in by themselves all night, and hard worked all day, and nobody may speak but the parson, and he praying and preaching night and morning, till a fellow’s spirit is downright broken? Remember it! aye; and glad enough I have been many a time that we are not there. I’d rather be hanged twice over.” “Hanged! Yes: there’s not much in hanging. I have seen it several times, and thought to myself, ‘if that’s all, I should not mind it.’ But we are the best off, after all. I was horribly afraid, when old wiggy began to whimper, that it was to be the hulks, or a long prison, instead of going abroad; for one never knows what they mean when they say ‘transportation.’ You would not have looked so downcast as you did if you had known what was before you.“