This, however, is ground that should be trod with caution. Useful as such revelations may be in guiding us towards conclusions on which vigorous action may be based, it should be constantly borne in mind that it is not all pure and untainted truth that proceeds from the mouths of the juvenile habitual criminal in gaol any more than from his elders under the same conditions. A talent for gammoning “Lady Green,” as the prison chaplain is irreverently styled, is highly appreciated amongst the thieving fraternity. Boys are as quick-witted as men in their way, and on certain matters much quicker. They are less doggedly obstinate than most adults of the same class, and more keenly alive to mischief, especially when its practice may bring them some benefit. I have witnessed several instances of this, and many others have been brought under my notice by prison officials. As, for instance, in a certain gaol that shall be nameless, the governor has a fixed conviction that the one huge fountain head of juvenile depravity is the tobacco pipe. And ample indeed are his grounds for such conclusion, since almost every boy that comes into his custody testifies to his sagacity. His old customers never fail. He invariably questions the male delinquent on the subject, and as invariably he gets the answer he expects, and which favours his pet theory: “It is all through smoking, sir; I never knowed what bad ’abits was afore I took to ‘bacca.’” The probabilities, however, are that the little villains are aware of the governor’s weakness, and humour it. It would seem so the more, because these same boys when quartered in another gaol, the master of which rode a hobby of another pattern, alter their tune so as to meet the emergency. There is a prison in the suburbs of London, one of the largest, and as far as I have had opportunity of judging, one of the best managed and conducted; but the governor of it has his boy-weakness. He is quite convinced in his own mind that the main spring of crime is the perusal of the sort of literature herein alluded to. This is a fact generally known among the juvenile criminal population, and they never fail to make the most of it when the time comes. I went the rounds of his gaol with this governor on one occasion, when the “boy wing” was occupied by about forty tenants, and in each case was the important question put, and in the majority of cases it was answered, “It was them there penny numbers what I used to take in, sir,” or words to that effect, and the little humbug was rewarded by a pat on the head, and an admonition “always to speak the truth.”