Those whose lives were forfeit were placed for a time—the length of which depended on various circumstances—in a place of solemn sequestration, to the care of which a society of holy men and women devoted their existence, and which was placed rather under the authority of the Church than of the State. The State, indeed, had done with them; they were already cut off from their place as citizens; it only remained for the Church to lead them with kind hand through paths of penitence and prayer to the door of a new life, a new hope—where this was possible. With some, with many perhaps, the soul seemed already dead before the body. When the time came, surrounded by a serious company of the “Brethren of Death,” whose prayers and solemn hymns made the last moments beautiful to those who were repentant, and awful to those who were hardened, the condemned drank an opiate, which closed their eyes in a painless sleep from which there was no waking, while those about them still prayed for the departing spirit on its way to a higher judgment. Beautiful histories were told of some who in the quiet of their cells, aided by the gentle ministrations of the Brothers and Sisters, came to see with an anguish of repentance the sinfulness of their past, and to rejoice in the thought of passing, sprinkled with fresh dews of penitence and forgiveness, away from a world whose temptations had been too strong for them. Of their forfeit lives they made a willing sacrifice, and they were glad to be allowed to lay them down. Children who had committed crimes, after fitting punishment were placed in settlements where they were kept under strict discipline and carefully instructed, the rudiments of some useful art being added to a simple education in general subjects. Girls were trained in household work, and all, as soon as they were grown men and women, were removed from these settlements to places where their past was unknown, unless they showed themselves so dyed with their early habits and so resolved to return to them that this would have been harmful to the State. In these cases, which were very few, they were treated in the same way as the hardened offenders of whom I have just spoken.