They were evidently a pair of ordinary commonplace habitual swindlers, deserving no special notice. But their rumoured gentility gained for them a species of misplaced sympathy; and they were excused transportation, to be sent instead, for reformation, to the Penitentiary, where they arrived on the 11th March, 1837. Of the mother it will be sufficient to say at once that she was an inoffensive tractable old woman, who bore her punishment with patience, and eventually died in prison. But Julia was cast in a different mould. Under thirty,—according to her own statement she was only nineteen,—full in figure, and florid of complexion, possessed, as was afterwards proved, of extraordinary physical strength, she displayed, from the first moment almost, an incorrigible perversity which made her in the end a perfect nuisance to the whole establishment. There was something ladylike about her when she was in a peaceable mood. Inexperienced people would have called her a gentlewoman. Not handsome or even good looking, but decidedly “interesting,” the matrons said when questioned before the Select Committee. She was accomplished: could draw and paint, and was very musical; sang beautifully—and certainly during her stay at Millbank she gave plenty of proof of the strength and compass of her voice; and with all this she was clever, designing, and of course thoroughly unprincipled. The day after her reception she endeavoured to tamper with the wardswoman; seeking to obtain paper and pencil “to write a letter to her mother.” When taxed with this breach of rules, she declared the wardswoman wanted to force the things upon her. Then she was found to have cut a page out of “The Prisoner’s Companion,” a book supplied to all. Questioned privately, Newman with many expressions of grief confessed her guilt. Mr. Nihil, who was still quite in the dark as to her real character, pardoned this offence. She was next charged with an attempt to induce a fellow-prisoner to pass on a message to her mother—the substance of which was that the elder Newman was to impose upon the chaplain by a hypocritical confession, in order to obtain thus the daughter’s release, Julia promising when free to contrive means by which the mother should also be discharged. The “dark” became her lot for this, and to it she again returned the following week, for refusing to clean out her cell. When the governor reasoned with her, she merely said she would be happy to pay some other prisoner to do it for her. This second visit to the dark brought her under the doctor’s notice, who ordered her to the infirmary, as she declared she was too weak to walk downstairs. Her face having grown quite pale and ghastly, help was sent for, when it was discovered that she had whitened it with chalk. She again visited the dark, and when released began again to communicate with her mother. Several “stiffs”[7] were intercepted, in which she tried to persuade her to smuggle a letter out to their solicitors.