Strange as it may seem, there were among the Romans a number of young men of good family who were receiving a regular remittance from their friends in France. When the quarterly remittance arrived, the young man would borrow a suit of clothes in which to fetch the money from the Agent’s office, and, having handed over £1 to the “General” to be spent in tobacco or potatoes for the community, would take his leave, buy clothes, and settle down in one of the other floors as a civilised being. But a fortnight later the twenty-five louis would have melted away at the gaming-tables, clothes and bedding followed, and the prodigal would slink back to his old associates, who received him with a boisterous welcome. During the brief intervals when he was clothed and in his right mind, many efforts were made by the decent prisoners to restrain him from ruin; but either the gambling fever or a natural distaste for restraint always proved too strong, and no instance of permanent reclamation in the prison is recorded. It was otherwise when the Romans were restored to liberty. One would think that such creatures—half-ape and half-hog—had finally cut themselves off from civilised society, and that they ended their lives in the slums and stews of Paris. That this was not the case is the strangest part of this social phenomenon. In the year 1829 an officer who had been in Dartmoor on forfeiture of parole attended mass in a village in Picardy, through which he happened to be passing. The curé preached an eloquent and spiritual sermon, a little above the heads of his rural congregation. One of his auditors was strangely moved, not by the matter of the sermon, but by vague reminiscences, gradually growing clearer, evoked by the features and gestures of the preacher. So certain did he feel that he had last seen this suave and reverend priest raking an offal heap in the garb of Adam that he knocked at the sacristy door after the service. The curé received him formally with the “to-what-do-I-owe-the-honour” manner. “Were you not once a prisoner at the Depot of Dartmoor?” The priest flushed to his tonsure and stammered, but at last faltered an affirmative, adding sadly that imprisonment was very harmful both to body and soul. “Do you remember me?” the officer asked.