and bare-legged as high as the knees, and with his checked shirt stripped back from his breast and shoulders. If I had resided in such a street, I think I should, under all circumstances, much have preferred occupying number one, than hermitage number fifty at the far end.

The governer wore a little sprig of holly in his coat buttonhole, in order, I suppose, that his bird might not forget the festive occasion. "You haven't washed your eyes clean, Ninety-nine," said he, smartly, addressing a middle aged, woe-begone wretch whose downcast vision was seemingly fixed on an upside-down governor reflected in the inky looking-glass he stood on, "what's the reason of that, Ninety-nine? On Christmas Day too!" The rebuked prisoner raised his eyes suddenly, and at the same instant appeared to try and gulp down a pill he had been holding in his tight shut mouth. "That's what it is," he presently answered, huskily, and as though the impediment, after all, had stuck in his gullet, "them at home. That's all, sir. Excuse me!" And the discipline of the jail compelling him to keep both his hands straight to his sides during parade, there was nothing to hinder the two great tears coursing down his face, and there they remained bedewing his grizzly beard during the remainder of the inspection. If Christmas was present at that moment-and, though by evidence, visual or nasal, could I have borne witness to it, since they "kept" him there, of course, he must have been-who can doubt but that he at once despatched one of his invisible agents to give that prisoner's family, at all events, some inkling of those twinkling drops-buds of promise of an amended future?

When we (the governor and I) had made sure that the privileges of the two-quart zinc bowl and the morsel of mottled soap had been dutifully exercised, we all went to chapel, a queerly-shaped hall attached to the prison, with plenty of elbow-room between each prisoner, and pulpit-like perches for the warders, who were well selected for the duty on account of their keenness of vision for detecting anything in the nature of dumb motions and for quick hearing; but other words than those in the hymnbook were sung out from one to another under cover of the

tune.

Old Christmas was present. He was introduced by the chaplain in the guise of a sermon concerning the high moral advantages which attached to being on terms of peace and goodwill with all men. There was a double row of persons seated immediately in front of the governor's curtained pew, a show of distinction conferred on them on account of their especially ruffianly character, and I am afraid I lost a good bit of the sermon in speculating on how much of goodwill they felt for the two stalwart and determined prison officials who so unwinkingly watched over them. But it was hardly likely that of all days in the year they would misconduct themselves this morning. Towards the close of the sermon someone entered at a door, and as one man they sniffed and uttered a kind of aching sigh. They smelt it!

The service over, we (the governor, the chaplain and the heads of the establishment) went down in the kitchen and saw them dishing it up-the dinner I mean, of course. Ah! Christmas was here, sure enough. There was his beef, great piles of it, as one sees the great cubes of paving granite stocked by the roadside, tender and juicy, and deliciously brown, and all hot from the mighty ovens from which it had just been drawn. And the puddings! Was it possible to produce a genuine Christmas pudding from a prison copper? The proposition was satisfactorily solved, the instant I put my head into the kitchen door. "Stone

walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage," neither do the universally agreed on ingredients necessarily make a Christmas pudding. There is an aroma about the genuine article that only the generous breath of the King of Goodfellowship can impart to it, and it was here. It was so good that as we stood by the laden board in a spicy mist, we begged each a substantial taste from the scalesmen who weighed the rations, and smacked our lips over it, though it burnt our fingers to hold it. Half-a-pound of roast beef (without bone), half-a-pound of pudding, a pound of mealy potatoes, and a bountiful helping of gravy for every occupant of a cell, and in less than twenty minutes from the time the potato nets were drawn from the cauldrons the whole five hundred were feeding.

With a difference, however. They were jail-birds every one, and none of them doves. At the same time it would be doing many an injustice to say that they were birds of a feather, and callous as carrion crows whence the food came, so long as it was good, and there was enough of it to warm their maw. In the panels of every cell door there is a tiny peep-hole with a slide that can be noiselessly pushed back, and my more delicate scruples being overcome by curiosity to see with what kind of appetite a dungeon captive can tackle his Christmas dinner, I did as I was invited, and here and there peeped in. In the majority of cases, I am bound to say, that the diners appeared not in the least dejected nor made miserable by the mystic influence of the season acting on their accusing conscience. Only they were a trifle more wolfish in the glare of their eyes and the champing of their jaws, this kind might for all the emotion they betrayed, have been seated at a cook-shop table, partaking of a meal freely ordered and honestly paid for.

But they were not invariably of this kind. I peeped in at number Ninety-nine, and the silly fellow's face was hidden in his hammock-rug, while his untasted beef and pudding was growing cold on the hinged board against the wall that served as a table. There was another man, quite a young fellow, who had some talent for drawing, and tc comfort him in his solitude, he had drawn with pencil on paper portrait sketches of his wife and his two children. He had made up his mind for a dinner-party seemingly, for he had propped up his pictures on each side his plate; but he must have broken down at an early stage of the rash experiment, for the pile of food appeared to be diminished, while the wretched artist, hiding his face in his hands, was sobbing like a schoolboy. This was the last prisoner I peeped at, and somehow I felt that I had enough of it, the impression I came away with being that, undoubtedly, Christmas in prison had a melancholy time of it.

THE END.

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