The extreme penalty of death is by no means rare in New Caledonia, and the condemned cells in the prison of the island of Nou, six in number, are sometimes simultaneously full. An execution in that far-off place of penitence reproduces the scene in Paris; the preliminaries are the same and the ceremony is identical. The same cruel uncertainty hangs over the fate of the condemned, who hears his doom only an hour or two before he is guillotined. The commandant of the island, the chaplain and the chief warden, visit him at three o'clock in the morning and convey the dread summons, _c'est pour aujourdhui_, the final, fatal decision he has been awaiting day after day for weeks. Then follows _la toilette de la mort_, the dressing for death, when the headsman "_Monsieur de l'Ile Nou_," pinions him and cuts away the collar of his shirt lest it should break the fall of the swiftly descending knife. The actual performance takes place in the great courtyard, where the scaffold has been erected and the audience is ready. All the great officials of the colony are there, and a sufficient number of troops to overawe the body of convicts arranged row behind row within full view of the stage to which the principal performer ascends. He is allowed to make a short address to his comrades, kneeling and bareheaded before him. Then he is put into position upon a sloping plank, which slides into place so that his neck is pushed out through an opening and is ready for the swift-falling blade. The _forçats_ are distributed all over the colony where there is work in progress, on farms and agricultural stations, clearing forest primeval and in mining operations of a very arduous character. The idle and ill-conducted, the incorrigible who will not labour and are in a chronic state of insubordination, are committed to disciplinary camps partly for punishment, partly for seclusion. Nowhere is the régime more severe, the daily rations less, the daily task harder. There are none of the small luxuries of wine and tobacco, and they sleep on guard beds with a leg in iron chained to a bar at the end. The penalty of solitary confinement on bread and water is promptly inflicted for any breach of discipline, and those who prove perfectly intractable are sent as hopeless to the cells of the central prison at the island of Nou. Henceforth there is no further change--they are deemed hopeless and incurable. One form of punishment is peculiar to these camps. It might be called perpetual motion. A number of convicts, twenty or thirty, are ranged in single rank in a large shed, some sixty feet in length and forty in breadth, and set to march round and round incessantly, pausing only for a couple of minutes every half hour. Stone seats, each a kind of flat topped pyramid, are fixed at intervals around the shed and afford a brief rest from time to time, but the march is speedily resumed and continues from dawn to sunset of the nearly interminable day.