goods train, whilst my companions could run at express speed when it suited them. My employment was knitting and reading aloud to the prisoners. At that time, and up to a very recent date, it was the custom where fifty or a hundred prisoners were at work, for one of the prisoners to read aloud an hour every forenoon and afternoon. When I commenced this reading, my audience were very careless about listening, unless when I read some amusing work of fiction. Indeed, other prisoners did not attempt to read any book of a more solid description. But during the years I was engaged in this way I had the most abundant and satisfactory testimony that I had obtained an influence over the minds of the prisoners, and had succeeded in attracting their attention to general literature in a more effectual manner than any of my predecessors. My readers will have been accustomed, perhaps, to regard convicts as very ignorant men, but it must be borne in mind that they belong to all classes of society, and if I were to speak of them in the mass, I should say that they were much more intelligent and as well educated as the ordinary peasantry of England. When I commenced reading in prison there were a good many works in the library, which were afterwards withdrawn as being too amusing for the place. These were such works as "The Last Days of Pompeii," "Now and Then," "Adam Bede," "Poor Jack," "Margaret Catchpole," "Irving's Sketch-book," "Dickens's Christmas Tales," &c. There still remained periodicals with tales in them, and these with a mixture of historical, biographical and other-works, constituted the general reading in the work-rooms. The periodicals I note in the order of their popularity, "Chambers's Journal," "Leisure Hour," "Good Words," "The Quiver," "Sunday Magazine," and "Sunday at Home." The reading of an article in the "Leisure Hour," entitled the "Thief in the Confessional," was the chief cause of the readings being discontinued both in the work-rooms and the hospital. As this happened recently and the particulars are still fresh in my memory I will narrate them here. There were readings aloud in four hospital and three work-rooms in the prison. In the hospital the Roman Catholics were kept by themselves, and had a Roman Catholic reader. In the prison they were scattered among the Protestants, and in the three work-rooms referred to, perhaps about one-fifth of the prisoners were Roman Catholics. In these rooms a Protestant reader was appointed, and there was no disturbance about this arrangement until the arrival of a few Fenians, and a zealous or rather an officious priest.