I had gone to Noumea full up to the roots of my hair with the utterly erroneous notions which I had picked up from books and conversations. The books appear to have been written mostly by returned _déportés_ or _communards_ who had been banished in ’71 and ’72, and allowed to return to France after the general amnesty. The people with whom I had conversed had apparently got their knowledge from somewhat similar sources, but all agreed in representing New Caledonia as a second Tasmania, or Norfolk Island, where all the uncivilised barbarities of our own transportation system had been prolonged to the end of the nineteenth century. Its population consisted of a vast horde of convicts, the most abandoned and bloodthirsty wretches on earth, ground down into hopeless slavery by the irresistible and unpitying strength of an official engine called the Penitentiary Administration. The officials were a set of soulless gaolers in whose natures every spark of humanity had been quenched by the performance of their pitiless task. The surplus of the population consisted of half-tamed natives and a few thousand _libérés_, or ticket-of-leave men, any one of whom would knock you on the head or stick a knife into you for a couple of francs. Finally I was regarded in Paris as rather madder than the average Englishman for wanting to go to such a God-forsaken place, being neither a convict who had to go nor an official who wanted to earn a comfortable _retraite_ and save up the wherewithal to purchase rentes on which to spend the balance of his days in that peace and quiet which is the domestic heaven to which all good Frenchmen look forward. Now this is what I actually saw of convict-life in Noumea before I had passed the prison gates for the first time. I had eaten my second dinner at the Cercle, and Lord Dunmore, taking pity on my isolation, said: “The convict-band is playing in the square to-night, suppose we go and get some seats?” “The convict what?” I said, harking back mentally to the rigid English system, and trying to picture to myself an English convict blowing a cornet. “It’s what they call here the Musique de la Transportation. It’s quite an institution in Noumea. I don’t suppose there’s anything like it anywhere else.” So I went, feeling verily a stranger in a strange land. It was an absolutely perfect tropical night. The moon was getting up over the eastern end of the Chaine Centrale, a ridge of mountains which runs through Caledonia from north-east to south-west; the cafés along the top of the square were glittering with light; a deliciously cool breeze was blowing down from the mountains through the trees.