The ordinary charge-sheet of a goldfield is fairly filled as a rule, and at this particular period of the existence of Ballarat as a town a large proportion of criminals of all shades and classes had managed to make it their temporary home. Expirees from Tasmania, where the transportation system had only lately come to an end, had swelled the proportion of habitual criminals. These were daring and desperate men; an inexorable penal system had partially controlled, but failed altogether to reform them. So frequent had been the assaults upon life and property with which this class was credited, that an official of exceptional firmness and experience had been specially selected for the responsible post of police magistrate of Ballarat. This gentleman, Mr. M'Alpine, generally familiarly and widely known as 'Launceston Mac,' was credited with using a short and trenchant way with criminals. Presumably a large proportion of his _clientèle_ had been at some time or other before him in Tasmania. He had, it was conceded, a wonderful memory for faces, as also for 'accidents and offences.' It was asserted for him that he never met a man under penal circumstances that he could not recognise if encountered twenty years afterwards. It was only necessary in the case of doubtful identity to direct the attendant police to 'turn him round,' which formula was almost invariably followed by the remark, 'Seen you before, my man, on the other side, your name is so-and-so. Six months' imprisonment with hard labour.' Doubtless in nineteen cases out of twenty the inference was correct, and the punishment just. But there _was_ a probability that occasionally the worthy justice was mistaken. Among the hordes of criminals with which he had been officially connected, small wonder if an occasional lapse of memory took place, and then so much the worse for the accused. But, as in all comprehensive schemes of legislative repression the individual suffers for the general advantage, so the occasional misdirections of justice, in that era of widespread license which might so easily degenerate into lawlessness, were but lightly regarded as incident to a period of martial law; and no one gainsaid the fact that the practised readiness, prompt decision, and stern resolve which Mr. M'Alpine brought to bear upon the thousands of cases were of priceless advantage to the body politic and all law-abiding citizens.