This prisoner was a more than usually clever and intelligent type of a numerous class of convicts--not the most difficult class to cure, but the next to it, perhaps. Unlike the city-bred professional thief, he had been taught to work, and such work as he could perform was no punishment to him. Unlike the professional, he goes out of the prison hesitating, wavering, as to his future course: willing to take work if suitable; determined to avoid the workhouse; easily tempted to steal, resolved to do so rather than starve; but, on the whole, anxious to make a comfortable livelihood. He had one son, and I remember well how glad he was when some benevolent person wrote to him to say that he had been bound an apprentice to a respectable trade. He is now dead. Another of my companions was of a somewhat different class, and a much more difficult subject to deal with. He told me that he was fifty-seven years of age. I asked him how long he had been a prisoner, not adding his sentences together, but how long he had actually been in prison. "Thirty-seven years," he replied. "How old were you when you got into trouble first?" "Fourteen." "What was your first sentence?" "Seven years' transportation." "How did you like Australia?" "Well, the place is well enough, and a man can get a living easier abroad than he can at home. But I have been rather a queer customer in my time. I don't believe there's a man in this prison, or in any prison, who has gone through more hardships and punishments than I have done." "Were you ever flogged?" "Flogged! I should think I have. Just wait until night, when I am going to bed, and I'll let you see my back all in ridges with the cat." "What effect had the flogging on your conduct?" "Flogging takes out one devil and puts in seven. That's the effect it had on me. But there's not one in a hundred could stand the floggings and punishments I have endured. I had ten years once in Australia, and I was in the penal class most of the time, and, by jingo! they know how to punish there." "Suppose I were to offer you 20_l._ to be flogged, would you accept the money and take the flogging?" "I should think I would, and that very quick, too. I would as soon take a bashing as bread and water for seven days." "Then a bashing, as you call it, would not frighten you from committing a crime?" "If I thought I was going to be caught even, I should not commit a crime. A 'flat' or a 'mumper' may do a job to get into prison, but I never do anything unless I believe I am to escape. It's the getting caught, that's the crime, the punishment you have got to chance. A fellow needn't begin thieving if he is to be frightened at punishment; he would never make a living at it. It requires a fellow with a good heart to be a thief, I can tell you; and if his heart is not in the right place, he'd better keep on the square."