"Mr. Bumble grasped the undertaker by the arm and led him into the building. Mr. Sowerberry was closeted with the board for five minutes, and then it was arranged that Oliver should go to him that evening 'upon liking'—a phrase which means, in the case of a parish apprentice, that if the master find, upon a short trial, that he can get enough work out of a boy without putting too much food in him, he shall have him for a term of years to do what he likes with. "When little Oliver was taken before 'the gentlemen' that evening, and informed that he was to go that night as general house-lad to a coffin-maker's, and that if he complained of his situation, or ever came back to the parish again, he would be sent to sea, there to be drowned or knocked on the head, as the case might be, he evinced so little emotion, that they by common consent pronounced him a hardened young rascal, and ordered Mr. Bumble to remove him forthwith." Some years ago an investigation into the treatment of the poor in St. Pancras workhouse was made. It originated in the suicide of a girl, who, having left her place, drowned herself rather than return to the workhouse to be confined in the "shed"—a place of confinement for refractory and ill-disposed paupers. The unanimous verdict of the coroner's jury was to this effect, and had appended to it an opinion that the discipline of the shed was unnecessarily severe. This verdict led to an investigation. Mr. Howarth, senior churchwarden, a guardian, and a barrister, explained that the shed was used for separating able-bodied, idle, and dissolute paupers from the aged and respectable inmates of the house. The shed was not, he declared, a place of confinement any more than the workhouse itself. The place in question consists of two rooms, a day-room and a dormitory, on the basement of the main building, two feet below the level of the soil, each about thirty-five feet long by fifteen wide and seven high. The bedroom contains ten beds, occupied sometimes by sixteen, sometimes by twenty or twenty-four paupers. According to the hospital calculation of a cube of nine feet to an occupant, the dormitory should accommodate six persons. The damp from an adjoining cesspool oozes through the walls. This pleasant apartment communicates with a yard forty feet long, and from fifteen to twenty broad, with a flagged pavement and high walls. This yard is kept always locked. But it is not a place of confinement. Oh no! it is a place of separation. Let us see the evidence of James Hill, who waits on the occupants of the shed:—"They are locked up night and day. They frequently escape over the walls. They are put in for misconduct."