My Sunday routine differed from that of the other days of the week, chiefly in having chapel-going substituted for work, and being allowed to be in bed an hour longer in the morning. Shortly after taking up my abode in the twenty-four-bedded room, the diet was changed, and this was the cause of much noise among the convicts. The day fixed for the alteration was a Sunday. The former Sunday's dinner consisted of soup, mutton, and potatoes. The new Sunday dinner was dry bread and four ounces of bad cheese. On being served with this, the prisoners began cursing and swearing, and calling the head officials all the bad names they could think of: "This is what they call Christianity, is it, the ---- hypocrites? Starving a man on Sundays above all days, and then taking us up to that chapel to tell us about mercy and forgiveness and loving our neighbours! This is the way to reform us and make us better, is it?--By jingo! I will make somebody pay for all this yet. I'll not get my next bit for nothing," &c., &c. Such was the burden of the conversation on this and succeeding Sunday afternoons. To force men to go to hear the Word of God preached when their hearts are full of evil thoughts and their mouths full of curses is far from being a likely mode of leading men to Christ. The chaplain's position in the pulpit used to strike me as being something like that of a farmer sowing good seed broad-cast over a field so overgrown with tares, that the seed could never reach the soil. If he attempts to clear the soil of the weeds, to win the hearts of the prisoners, he finds the whole system of prison discipline arrayed against him. That discipline breeds and encourages the growth of every evil passion in the heart of man, and he, the chaplain, is part of that system: he lives by it, and he is not allowed to interfere with it, at all events he never did so. When prisoners complained to him of some injustice or some cruelty, they got for reply: "I am here to preach the Gospel, and I can do nothing in the matter."