It was with great pleasure I heard him say this. During a residence of thirteen years at Belleville, there has not been one execution. The county of Hastings is still unstained with the blood of a criminal. There is so little robbery committed in this part of the country, that the thought of thieves or housebreakers never for a moment disturbs our rest. This is not the case in Hamilton and Toronto, where daring acts of housebreaking are of frequent occurrence. The constant influx of runaway slaves from the States has added greatly to the criminal lists on the frontier. The addition of these people to our population is not much to be coveted. The slave, from his previous habits and education, does not always make a good citizen. During the last assizes at Cobourg, a black man and his wife were condemned to be hung for a most horrible murder, and their son, a young man of twenty years of age, offered the sheriff to hang his own father and mother for a new suit of clothes. Those who laud the black man, and place him above the white, let them produce in the whole annals of human crime a more atrocious one than this! Yet _it was not a hanging matter_. I heard a gentleman exclaim with honest indignation, when this anecdote was told in his hearing--"If a man were wanting to hang that monster, I would do it myself." But leaving the male convicts, I must now introduce my reader to the female inmates of this house of woe and crime. At the time of my visit, there were only forty women in the Penitentiary. This speaks much for the superior moral training of the feebler sex. My chief object in visiting their department was to look at the celebrated murderess, Grace Marks, of whom I had heard a great deal, not only from the public papers, but from the gentleman who defended her upon her trial, and whose able pleading saved her from the gallows, on which her wretched accomplice closed his guilty career. As many of my English readers may never have heard even the name of this remarkable criminal, it may not be uninteresting to them to give a brief sketch of the events which placed her here.