Mr. Lee, the master of the workhouse, declares that if the persons in the shed make application to come out, they are frequently released. He is "not aware if he has any legal right to refuse them, but does sometimes exercise that authority." One of the women is there for throwing her clothes over the wall; another for getting "overtaken in liquor" while out of the house, and losing her pail and brush. A third inmate is a girl of weak intellect, who went out for a day, was made drunk and insensible by a male pauper, and suffered dreadful maltreatment. All the pauper witnesses represent the shed as a place of punishment. The six ounces of meat given three times a week by the dietary, is reduced to four ounces for the shed paupers. Still all this, in Mr. Howarth's eyes, neither constitutes the shed a place of confinement nor of punishment. It is a place of separation. So is a prison. It is a prison in a prison; a lower depth in the lowest deep of workhouse wretchedness and restraint. Are we to be told that this is "classification," (as the report of the directors impudently calls it,) by which the young and old, imbecile and drunken, sickly and turbulent, are shut up together day and night picking oakum; looking out through the heavy day on the bare walls of their wretched yard—at night breathing their own fœtid exhalations and the miasma of a cesspool, twenty-four of them sometimes in a space only fit to accommodate six with due regard to health and decency? And all this at the arbitrary will of master or matron, unchecked by the board! One poor creature had been there for three years. She had not come out because "she was in such bad health, and had nowhere to go." Yet she was shut up, because she was considered able bodied and fit for work, when her appearance belied it, and spoke her broken spirit and shattered constitution. Mr. W. Lee, guardian, seemed blessed with an unusual amount of ignorance as to his legal powers and responsibilities. He kept no account of persons confined in the black-hole, for forty-eight hours sometimes, and without directions from the board. He thought the matron had power to put paupers in the strong room. On one point he was certain: he "had no doubt that persons have been confined without his orders." He "had no doubt that he had received instructions from the board about the refractory ward, but he does not know where to find them." "If any paupers committed to the ward feel aggrieved, they can apply to be released, and he had no doubt he would release them." He made no weekly report of punishments. He reigned supreme, monarch of all he surveyed, wielding the terrors of shed and black-hole unquestioned and unchecked.