“I did not. I was never asked the question.” He was then asked if he had ever tried to controvert the religion of the Penitentiary, but he distinctly denied having done so. Then came the prisoner’s turn. “I assure you, sir,” he told Mr. Nihil, “that this officer on one occasion remarked to me that St. Paul took up several chapters in telling women what sort of ribbons they wore in their bonnets.” And on this evidence Mr. Mann lost his situation; for, says the Governor, “I considered his answers evasive throughout; while the prisoner being an exceedingly well-conducted man, I have no doubt, from the tenour of the whole proceedings, that he spoke the truth.” Hard measure this, and scarcely calculated to maintain the discipline of the establishment. Still harder, perhaps, was the dismissal of another officer, who was found using what was characterized as a species of low slang in speaking of prisoners. “It came out very artlessly,” says Mr. Nihil, “as he was telling me of some boyish irregularity of a prisoner, whom he styled a ‘rascal.’ This, coupled with other appearances, determined me that the man may have meant no great harm, but that he was quite unfit for the moral charge here entrusted to him; and I thought it necessary, not only in regard to this offence, but that others might take a lesson from it, to mark my sense of the unfitness of one in the habit of familiarly using such language for the situation of warder.” When a fate so severe overtook these two for the offences recorded, a third was not likely to escape who was proved to have occasionally sworn, and who admitted that he considered it was all humbug taking the prisoners to chapel. Although this culprit held the grade of taskmaster, and had completed a service of many years, he too was forthwith sent about his business. But then it was brought home to him that he had once been heard to say, “The governor thinks himself a sharp fellow—I think him the—— fool I ever knew.” It also appeared that this officer’s familiar language among other officers was very profane. He sometimes ridiculed religion; and at one time scoffed at the miracle of the sun standing still. On one occasion he spoke of the chaplain’s lectures as humbug. “My own impressions of T.,” says the governor-chaplain, “were that though he was an efficient officer, he was a conceited self-sufficient man, and of his moral principles I had no good opinion. Everything led to the conviction that he was a very dangerous character in an institution of this kind; his general bearing giving him influence over the inferior officers, and his principles and habits being such as to turn that influence to pernicious account.” He was accordingly dismissed by the committee “with the strongest reprobation of his abominable hypocrisy.”