Soon afterward seven prisoners made their escape in a body from the prison. They were lodged in a large room—afterward the officers’ mess—the windows of which were without bars; and they were able therefore to climb through them on to the roof. They took their blankets with them, and making a ladder, descended by it. The policeman on duty outside roused the lodge-keeper, to say he had seen a man scale the boundary wall between one and two in the morning, by a heavy ladder reared against the wall. All the officers were roused and stationed round the prison; while close search was made in the numerous gardens, stone-yards, etc. At half-past four, two officers came back with four prisoners in a cab. They had been tracked almost from the walls of the prison and captured at Chiswick. The other three were caught at Watford by a recruiting-sergeant and an inspector of the Hertfordshire police. They were on their way to Two Waters. Next day a conspiracy was detected among the prisoners, who brought in coke from the garden, to escape while so employed. Almost immediately afterwards four other prisoners were caught in the very act of escaping through the top of the cell they occupied. They had broken away the lath and plaster ceiling of the cell, removed the slate slab above it, and had taken off the roof slate to a sufficient extent to allow of easy egress; their sheets had been torn up and were knotted together, and everything was ready for their descent. The next attempt, within a week or two, was made by a prisoner who found that the mouth of the foul air shaft, to which his cell was adjacent, was not protected by bars; accordingly he broke through the wall of his cell, and having thus gained access to the shaft, would have gained the roof easily had his artifice not been discovered just in time. Two others picked the lock leading to the garden, meaning to escape in the evening; and just then by chance it fell out that the prisoner bookbinders had been long maturing a plan of escape. They had made a large aperture in the floor of their cell, which hole had been concealed by pasteboard. The whole of the party (three in number) were privy to the plot, and each descended in turn to the vault below the cell, which was on the ground floor, to work at the external wall of the prison. This, when their plot was discovered, they had cut three parts through. They had also prepared three suits of clothing from their towels, and had hidden these disguises beneath some rubbish in the vault, where were also discovered a mason’s hammer, the blade of a shears, and a cold chisel. A rope ladder had also been made for scaling the boundary wall, but it had been subsequently cut up as useless. The intending fugitives thought of making a better ladder from broom handles, to be supplied by a brush-maker in an adjoining cell, who was also in the plot. They had worked at night by candlelight. In this case it is not too much to say that the officials in charge of these