It followed, too, from the nature of their previous vocations, that the convicts assigned in towns were the sharpest and most intelligent of their class. They were therefore the more prone to dissipation, and the more difficult to restrain within bounds. Knowing their value, they presumed on it, and felt that they were too useful to be sent off as rough farm hands into the interior. Here was another blot in the system of assignment, and generally on the whole principle of transportation. The punishment fell quite unequally on offenders. The biggest villains and the most hardened offenders fell naturally into the lightest "billets;" while the half-educated country bumpkin, whose crime may have been caused by ignorance or neglect, was made a hewer of wood and drawer of water. Prominent among those of the first class were specials, or gentlemen convicts, as they were styled; men sentenced for "genteel" crimes, forgery only, or embezzlement, but whose delicate fingers had never handled the cracksman's jimmy, or tampered with foil or blow. These genteel criminals were forever, through all the days of transportation, a thorn in the side of the administration, and they were always treated with far more consideration than they deserved. Some of these were well-known men, like one who had been a captain in the royal navy, and whose proclivities were so ineradicable that he suffered a second sentence at Norfolk Island for forgery, his favourite crime. From among this class the lawyers selected their clerks, and the auctioneers their assistants. If unusually well-educated they became teachers in schools, and were admitted as such even into the public seminaries of Sydney. A flagrant instance of the consequences of this injudicious practice is quoted by Laing--a clergyman's son, who had a convict tutor, coming himself, under the influence of such a man's teaching, to be also a convict sentenced to transportation for life.