allowed to be for one moment out of an officer’s sight; that officer starts in the morning with a certain number of convicts in charge: he must bring in the same number on his return to the prison. Beyond the vigilant eye of these officers in charge of small parties ranges a wide cordon of warder-sentries, who are raised on high platforms and have an uninterrupted view around. A carefully prepared code of signals serves to give immediate notice of escape. A shrill note on the whistle, a single shot from a sentry’s breechloader sounds the alarm—“A man gone!” Next second, the whistles re-echo, shot answers shot; the parties are assembled in the twinkling of an eye, and a force of spare officers hasten at once to the point from whence came the first note of distress. It is next to impossible for the fugitive to get away: if he runs for it he is chased; if he goes to ground they dig him out; if he takes to the water he is soon overhauled. The cases are few and far between of successful evasion. In every case the luck or the stratagem has been exceptional—as when at Chatham a man was buried by his comrades brick by brick beneath a heap, and interment was completed before the man was missed; or when at Dartmoor, another broke into the chaplain’s house, stole clothes, food, and a good horse, on which he rode triumphantly away. At Millbank from first to last the escapes, successful and unsuccessful, have been many and varied. Pickard Smith’s was not the first nor the last. The earliest on record occurred in April, 1831. One night about 10 o’clock it was reported to the governor that the rooms of three of the officers had been entered and a quantity of wearing apparel abstracted therefrom. Almost at the same moment the sergeant patrol came in from the garden to say that the patrol on duty in going his rounds had discovered two men in the act of getting over the garden wall by means of a white rope, made of a “cut of cross-over.”[4] Both men were on the rope, and when it was shaken by the patrol they fell off and back into the garden; but they attacked the officer, knocked him down, and then ran off in an opposite direction. The patrol, as soon as he could recover himself, gave the alarm, and presently the governor, chaplain, surgeon, steward, and a number of other officers arrived on the spot. They separated in parties to make search, while the governor took possession of the cross-over cut, which was fastened to the top of the wall by means of a large iron rake twisted into a hook. This rake was used in the ward for bringing out large cinders from the long stove. It was thought at first that, in the patrol’s absence when giving the alarm, the fugitives must have got over the wall; but the search was continued in the dark, in and out of the tongues between the pentagons, and through all the gardens. Just by the external tower of Pentagon four, the governor and chaplain, who were together, came upon two men crouching in close under the wall.