me that Dumas was of a jealous disposition, which grandfathers sometimes are. He had one eye on the beauties of the garden and the other on his children. 'What are you doing?' said Dumas. I replied that I was embracing my sister. As he could not well object to this, for once, I think, I got the better of the lady's eminent grandfather." He had a story too of the younger Dumas. Labouchere was at the wedding of Mlle. Maria Dumas, and her brother, on coming to the sacristy with all the family friends for the signature of the register, looked at the document for a minute, as if perusing it carefully, and then said with mock gravity, "The accused have nothing further to add for their defence? Be it so!" And then he signed. Mr. Labouchere's curiosity at this period of his life was insatiable. He wanted to know what it felt like to be a criminal about to be hanged. So, having procured an invitation to see all over Newgate, he carried out his experiment, and described his sensations in the columns of the _Daily News_. After giving a vivid account of the prison and some of its inmates, he wrote the following realistic lines: "And now we were led through a long stone passage open to the sky. This was the Newgate graveyard. Beneath each flag is the corpse of a murderer, and on the walls opposite are their initials, which have been cut by the warders to guide them through this murderous labyrinth. At the other end of the passage is the execution yard. The scaffold is put up the night before an execution, in a corner close by the door through which the condemned prisoner issues. The court is surrounded by high gloomy walls, and looks like the ante-chamber of Hades. I asked the warder whether in his opinion murderers {115} preferred being executed in public or private. He opined the former. 'The crowd keeps them up,' he said. 'They are not so firm, now it takes place in private.' I understand this feeling. If I were going to be hanged myself I should like the ceremony to take place _coram populo_. I should feel myself already dead in that dreary yard; and I should prefer, I imagine, after weeks or months of prison life, to have one more look at the world, even though that world were a howling mob, before quitting it for ever.