The chief interest lay in the court-yard, however, which was the common meeting place. No rules as to cleanliness or regularity of hours existed. No one was compelled to work and the great majority preferred to lounge in the sun. In the court were coffee and tobacco shops, while sellers of sweetmeats made their way through the crowds. Though capital punishment was nominally inflicted, it was never imposed unless there were eye witnesses of the crime, and seldom then. So of the eight hundred inmates of the Bagnio, six hundred were murderers, some of them professionals. Nearly all wore chains, some of which were heavy, and as several prisoners were attached to one chain occasionally conflicts arose as different members of the group exhibited divergent desires. Another visitor about the same time saw the picturesque side. He mentions the robbers, chiefs from Smyrna, stalking about the enclosure, the voluble Greeks and Armenians, the secretive Jews, and an Irishman or two, mingling with the stolid Turks. Inmates were sipping coffee, smoking, playing cards, disputing, fighting, while a furtive pickpocket made his rounds. In a corner a fever patient was stretched out oblivious to his surroundings, though the clamour sometimes was deafening. He goes on to say: “Yet physically the wretches were not ill-treated; they need not ever work unless they like. The court is small and so is the two-storied stable where they sleep upon the earth; but then these are men who perhaps never got between sheets nor lay on a bed in their lives. They may talk what they like, and when they like. They have a Mosque, a Greek chapel and a Roman Catholic chapel. They can have coffee and tobacco, and if they work they are supposed to be paid for it. There is no treadmill, no crank, there are no solitary cells.” The same observer describes the Zaptie or House of Detention as it then existed, and though the building as it exists to-day is improved, conditions are not essentially different. Then there were two communicating courts, where pickpockets, ordinary thieves, participants in affrays, and even murderers were confined. At night they were locked in rooms. One of these sleeping rooms, eleven by seventeen feet, was occupied at night by twelve men. In such places prisoners were kept an indefinite time awaiting trial, and perhaps then discharged without trial and without explanation. A large number of Turkish prisoners have been confined either for conspiracy against the government, or for daring to exhibit a certain amount of independence. An officer apparently high in favour to-day might be degraded on the next without warning. An interesting case of this kind is the case of Midhat Pasha, one of the best known men in Turkey thirty or forty years ago.