The statements just quoted are hardly credible and cannot be reconciled with the reports of others, from personal experience. Mr. Cook, an English evangelist, who has devoted himself to extensive prison visitation, has drawn a dark picture of this ideal penal settlement as he saw it in 1892. At that date general idleness was the rule. Hundreds hung about with no work to do. Criminals with the worst antecedents were included in the prison population. One had been a _bandido_ or brigand who had been guilty of seven murders; another had four murders to his credit and one assassin was in a totally dark cell, confined hand and foot, condemned to death and daily expecting to be shot. No fewer than one hundred and twelve slept in one large room without more supervision than that exercised by their fellows discharging the functions of warders. Mr. Cook expresses his wonder that they did not break out oftener into rebellion. As a matter of fact and as against the statement given above, outbreaks were not uncommon with fierce attacks upon officers and murderous affrays among the prisoners. Crime and misconduct are certainly not unknown in Ceuta. A gruesome description was given by a correspondent writing to the _London Times_ in the year 1876. When he visited the citadel prison he found from eight hundred to one thousand convicts lodged there in a wretched condition, clad only in tattered rags, the cast off uniforms of soldiers, generally insufficient for decency. They tottered in and out of the ruinous sheds supposed to shelter them, quarrelled like hyenas over their meagre and repulsive rations, which were always short through the dishonesty of the thieving contractor, and fought to the death with the knives which every one carried. Each shed contained from one to two hundred where they lay like beasts upon the ground. Vermin crept up the wall and dirt abounded on all sides. "No words of mine," said this outspoken eye-witness, "can paint the darkness, the filth, the seething corruption of these dens of convicts, dens into which no streak of sunlight, divine or human, ever finds its way, and where nothing is seen or heard but outrage and cruelty on the one hand, misery and starvation and obscenity on the other." There was a worse place, the "Presidio del Campo," or field prison in which the hard labour gangs[13] employed on the fortifications were housed in still filthier hovels, with less food and more demoralisation. This same correspondent when he enquired his way to the presidio was told by a Spanish officer: "They are not presidios but the haunts of wild beasts and nurseries of thieves." Obviously there is much discrepancy in the various accounts published. [13] Irons are not carried by the convicts, not even by those sentenced to imprisonment "in chains," _con la cadena_. They were considered an interference with the efforts and strength of the labourer.