Another group of young fellows is seen taking lessons in English from a polyglot; and so picture succeeds picture, until we see in another quadrangle more men at work, but the crowd generally engaged in and greatly excited over an election. The commissary whose duty it is to inspect, in the interest of his fellow prisoners, the supplies of food as they are delivered at the prison, has proved unsatisfactory, and permission has been given for the choice of another prisoner to replace him. There are several parties in the prison each anxious that one of their own group should be selected, hence the contest and the excited crowd of speakers and listeners. Some of the prisoners are “mugwumps” and take no interest in politics, even such as would touch their personalinterests, and of these a crowd interested in theology fills the screen; they are listening to a hot argument between a Protestant and a Romanist—an argument frequently interrupted by a little party of those who worship only the goddess of reason. Then follow on the screen the squad told off for fatigue duties for the day; they have just finished their tasks, and are settling down to their usual occupations, some throwing themselves down to rest, others joining a party whose sides are shaking with laughter, as they listen to two or three young men, excellent actors, who are improvising a scene, caricaturing the English, and introducing the peculiarities of the agent, turnkey, and other officials of the prison. {104} The pictures of the next quadrangle are much the same. A man is seen in violent grief with the letter in his hand which has just announced to him the death of wife, father, mother, or child, leaving him more desolate than ever. At the turnkey’s gate a group of men are being led off with a guard of soldiers to the Black Hole for a brutal assault on one of their fellow prisoners. But what has happened to alter the characters of the pictures when the fourth quadrangle appears on the screen? Work has stopped, arguments have ceased, the excellent meal, with numerous luxuries which a party of prisoners well supplied with money have prepared as the great event of their day, lies on the table before them disregarded, the food untasted. Where men are speaking at all, it is with the intensity of bitter disappointment, here and there with violent expressions of anger against the authors of their misery.