The markets and the trading must have afforded one of the chief interests in the prison life, and they have therefore been described as fully as is possible from scanty records. The daily inspection by the doctors has been alluded to; sickness and death came within the precincts of the Depot as to every other community of men. These will be dealt with in a later chapter. There was no prison chapel. It is possible there were attempts at something like prison worship; it is certain that at one time priests were allowed to reside in the prison, and in the last years of its existence there was a ministering Roman Catholic priest, the Bishop of Moulins, who was banished from France in 1791, and whose brief history, written by himself, will be found in Appendix G. An examination of the records shows that a large number of the prisoners were from Protestant districts of France, but the majority were, of course, if they professed any religion, Roman Catholics. This review of the chief factors in the prisoners’ life will enable the reader to form in his own mind a picture of what that life was, the main feature behind the stockade fences, which were enclosed by the outer prison wall, being that the community lived year after year with no female element—no solace from mother, wife, sweetheart, child, or female friend or adviser of any kind—and yet we have the evidence of Mr. Comm. Serle that they “show their satisfaction in the habits of cheerfulness peculiar to themselves”; {100a} and the American prisoner who, under the _nom de plume_ “Greenhorn,” published his experiences of Dartmoor in 1813, is reported by Mr. Basil Thomson {100b} to have been most struck on entering the prison by “the high spirits of the multitude.” He had expected “to find hunger, misery and crime, but everything indicated contentment, order and good fellowship.” Let us hope that, notwithstanding the fact that at Norman Cross many of the prisoners had been confined for ten years, while of those whom “Greenhorn” gazed upon, none had been behind the granite walls of Dartmoor more than four years, the dominant spirit was one of “contentment, order and good-fellowship”; but, unfortunately, it is beyond doubt that there was in the prison a submerged stratum of hungry, miserable, criminal individuals, who had been unable to resist the evil influence of their surroundings on natural or acquired tendencies.