At Prony, too, I renewed my acquaintance with the microbe. In fact, the Doctor was there because of him. One day a coast steamer had brought some tons of flour for the station, which depended entirely for its food on Noumea and Australia. The sacks were stacked under cover in the Commissariat Department. The little daughter of the Chief Surveillant got playing about among these sacks. Some infected rats had been doing the same a short time before, and so she got the plague. The Doctor was telegraphed for to Noumea, and he came and saved her, and, thanks to his skill and precautions, that was the only case in Prony, although we actually had the infection in the midst of us, and for the fifteen days that I was tied up there we ate bread made from that flour! I often had to pass the sacks, but I did so at a respectful distance. One morning, however, I had a bit of a fright. There had been a deluge of rain all night, and, when I woke, I found a dead and very wet mouse on my bedroom floor. What if it had come from those sacks? I drenched it with corrosive sublimate, and pitched it carefully out of doors with a stick. Then I poured petroleum over it and burnt it and the stick, and there the incident closed. It always struck me as somewhat of a miracle that rats did not find those sacks out and spread the plague broadcast among us. It would have been a terrible thing in that isolated camp, cut off from all communication with the world except the telegraph. Perhaps there were no rats. At any rate, I never saw any, and felt duly thankful. There are no roads about Prony, only footpaths, and not many of these, so we paid our visits to the camps in steam launches. When it was fine it was very pleasant work cruising about the picturesque bays, discoursing the while on crime, criminals, and colonisation with the intelligent Commandant, or swopping Anglo-French jokes and stories with the Doctor, who had a very pretty wit of his own. The Commandant was a firm believer in relegation and transportation generally, but like every one else, he looked down upon the _liberé_ and the _relégué_. According to him a _forçat_ was worth two _liberés_, and a _liberé_ was worth a _relégué_ and a half, if not more. Nevertheless, during my stay at Prony I saw a squad of _relégués_ working about as hard as I have ever seen men work. This was on the railway aforesaid. [Illustration: The Convict Railway at Prony. _Drawn by Harold Piffard from a photograph._] We started one morning, as usual, about five o’clock, and steamed across two or three bays to the Camp du Nord. In all the other camps the timber is got down from the hills to the sea by means of wood-paved slides, which are quite as much a feature of this part of Caledonia as the ice-slides are in Norway, but the Camp du Nord rises to the dignity of a railway on which that morning I did the most curious bit of railroading I have ever done.