It is simply useless to call it the crime of self-murder. or to talk of the sanctity of human life which God alone can give, and therefore He alone has a right to recall. In the case of prisoners who are suffering punishment for the attempt, there is sometimes a diplomatic endeavour, from mere policy, to give an assent to the moral reflectious pressed upon them: but when driven to speak their minds honestly, they invariably repeat that they see no reason why they should not divest themselves of an embarrassing possession. with which no one but themselves has uy concern whatever.

This mode of dealing with the subject is perhaps natural enough on the part of persons who have never taken any serious view of their moral responsibilities. but it is less easy to account for the extraordinary light-heartedness with which, for the most part, they are ready to plunge into the unknown darkness of the last mysterious change. As we have already said, no thought of what may lie beyond disturbs their mind; but it might have been imagined that the the ghastly associations of the grave and its slow decay, would at least have moved them to some shrinking from the physical results of dissolution. It is not so; they take the fatal step as casily and carelessly as they would lay themselves down to sleep in thei. bed.

"If you had succeeded in your attempt to kill yourself," the writer said to a young prisoner who had been rescued almost lifeless from the river where she had flung her self, "you would have been lying now cold and stiff under the coffinlid, unable to see the light of day or to hear the voice of a friend, and with no time left for repentance, or even a prayer for pardon. Are you not thankful to be re

Sometimes the immediate causes which lead to suicide seem strangely disproportioned to the gravity of the step. One girl, who was ready to fling maledictions at her rescuers, had three several times done her best to put an end to her existence. On two of these occasions she had, so far as her own will was concerned, practically succeeded— once by poison, and once by strangulation. She was to all appearance dead the last time, and would very soon have been so in reality, but for the care and toil bestowed on her by a kindly physician who was sent for on the discovery of her condition, and who spent a whole night in unceasing efforts to restore animation. He succeeded at last. and she did not thank him! She was given up to what she and her companions of the same unhappy class term with unconscious irony "a gay life." and she did find a fitful hollow enjoyment in the excitement of evenings spent in theatres and dancing-booths, and in the extravagant dresses and jewellery with which she adorned herself; but there caine to her sudden moments when the whole brilliant phantasmagoria of her existence would seem to roll away from her, and the reality of her position appear in its true colours, and straightway, without an instant's hesitation, she would take the best means in her power to divest herself of it altogether. She exemplified the truism that extremes meet. For the manner in which the subject is regarded

by these, the lowest outcasts of the people, is exactly similar to the view taken of it by the high-class leaders of society in modern France, where it is the fashion now to say, "On vit, parceque à moins de se tuer-on ne peut pas faire autrement." The hapless inmates of our prisons, however, consider the alternative of killing themselves preferable to an unwilling endurance of the primary evil.

While the recklessness and indifference with which suicide is resorted to, is almost universal in the lower stratum of society, the causes which lead to the impulse are of course very varied and often most pathetic. A poor old woman who had nearly reached the Scriptural threescore years and ten, was sentenced lately to a short term of imprisonment for attempted self-destruction. It had very nearly been successful, and in fact was so in the end, as the shock to her system from immersion in icecold water proved fatal, and she only lived one week after her release from jail. She related her simple history with the utmost coinposure. She had lived happily and respectably with her husband from the time of her early marriage in youth. He had a pension as a retired soldier, which supported them in comparative comfort when he was too old to work. Their home for twenty-eight years had been the little cottage in which he died at the commencement of an unusually severe winter. "He had been an angel," the poor woman said "so good and steady, and so kind to her" and when he was gone, she clung with passionate attachment to the little house in which she had spent so many happy years with him-but she could not pay the rent. His pension had of course expired with him, and she was, in fact, without the means of

living at all. She began by selling her little possessions, one after another in order to obtain food, and in this way she managed to live for a few weeks. When everything was gone except the scanty furniture of one rooni, the landlord appeared and claimed it for his unpaid rent. It was all carted away, including even the chest containing her clothing; then he turned her into the street and locked the door. There was but one refuge open to her on earth-the workhouse; but that last abode of wretchedness seems to hold a place in the minds of the poorundeservedly we think-equivalent in horror to one of the circles of Dante's Inferno. The idea of going to it does not seem to have occurred to the forlorn widow. She looked back for a moment at the closed door of her little earthly paradise, and then took her way shivering through a public park to the river. There, without apparently the slightest shrinking or dread, she flung herself into the water under a cold wintry sky. Two men happened to be going past in a boat. They rescued her just as she was sinking; and after consciousness had been restored, she was brought to the prison. She passed the time of her sojourn there in a strange dreamy state, talking only of her husband, and her hope of seeing him perhaps again if she could succeed in "getting out of this weary world." This hope had only been suggested to her mind by the religious consolations afforded to her in the prison, but it proved completely impossible to persuade her that she had not been perfectly justified in trying to die. She would have been quite willing to have repeated the experiment if death had not mercifully come to her uncalled, and thus at last his desire was granted.

A young man was once committed to jail on the same charge, who had acted apparently with as little thought of all that death might mean, as had been manifested by the simple old widow; but his case was otherwise in marked contrast to hers.

He was fairly well educated, the son of a respectable tradesman who lived with his family in London, and the young man was extremely pleasing both in appearance and manners. It happened that the writer saw him for the first time when he was being conveyed to the jail by the police, immediately after he had been taken out of the river in which he had tried to drown himself. It was rather a piteous spectacle; his hat had been lost, and his fair hair, dripping wet, hung over his eyes, that were glancing vaguely from side to side. He walked feebly, leaning heavily on his grim supporters, and had altogether a be wildered look, as if he could not understand how he happened to be still alive. Under the circumstances the visitor was very glad to be left alone with him in the prison cell next day, in order to hear from him what had led to his abhorrence of life at an age when it is wont to wear its brightest hues before the unclouded eyes of youth. He was quite willing to tell his story without reserve; but the sum and substance of his explanation was simply this: "I could not face my mother."

He had been expected home for a holiday on the evening of the day when he had flung his young life to the river depths. He had preferred to lie "uncofired and unannealed" rather than meet his mother's reproachful eyes. He had been the best loved of her children--apparently, as is often the case, just because he had been

the wildest and most unmanageable. His brothers and sisters were all doing well in good situations-steady, and respectable— helping their parents out of their earnings; but he had never been successful in anything, simply because his roving disposition had led him to abandon every employment he had tried after a short time, and go off in quest of something new. He had been unstable and thoughtless, fond of amusement, and, above all, of his liberty; but he did not seem to have been addicted to vice of any kind. A spendthrift, however, he had been most emphatically, and his mother had again and again struggled to pay his debts and give him a fresh start in some new career. This she had done a very few months previously, and a good opening had been found for him in a provincial city. She had furnished him with the means of establishing him in it, and had made a heartfelt appeal to him to give up all his careless, unsatisfactory ways, and set himself to work hard for his living in an honest, respectable manner. She told him that if he failed again, she did not think it would be possible for her to help him out of any difficulty. She had come to an end of her resources, and this was really his last chance and hers; if he again came back to her penniless and in debt, it would break her heart. Thus far the young man had gone quickly through his history, but when he came to that point he turned his head away, shamefaced and crimson to the temples, with tears in his eyes. Then he owned that the love of pleasure and freedom had again been too much for him. The weather had been beautiful and sunny; the duties of his post kept him at grinding toil amid dust and gloom. Without a thought of the

future or of the consequences one way or another, he had broken away from it all, following the first shining temptation that had lured him out to a summer day's enjoyment. Then, ashamed to go back to his employers, yet more ashamed to face his mother, to whom alone he could go even for food and shelter, he had obeyed a sudden wayward impulse, and flung himself to the embrace of death, with no other thought but that it was a means of escaping his immediate difficulties. It appeared that he had not for a single moment reflected on the dread import of the act, whereby he not only destroyed all the fair promise of a life in this world which had scarce reached maturity, but imperilled also the fairer hopes that might have shone for him in the eternal future.

The term of imprisonment which this young man went through proved to be of incalculable value to him. His advisers within the jail saw that it was a case which required very plain speaking as to the errors of his past, if his future was to be conducted on better principles and more creditable motives. He was not spared any of the stern truths which his unjustifiable conduct demanded; and he had ample time to ponder them in the solitude of his cell. The result was that a really remarkable change took place in him: his eyes were opened to the serious misdeeds of which he had been guilty; and although, in his case as in all others, it was impossible to make him believe that suicide was in itself a crime, he yet did perceive most strongly, how utterly unfit and unprepared he had been for an entrance on the unseer eternity.

When the time came for his release from prison, he found that

those who had not hesitated to deal severely with him, so far as his moral turpitude was concerned, were ready to be his true friends in helping him to make a new beginning. Some necessary assistance was given to him; he was reconciled to his parents, and amply fulfilled his promises of amendment. Most satisfactory accounts have been received of him, and of the steadiness and self-denial with which he laboured to support himself in an honest and independent manner. It was one of those cases in which the advantages of the system of prison-workers was strikingly manifest. If this young man had left the jail as reckless, and hopeless as when he entered it, the probabilities are that he would at once have taken means to accomplish more effectually than before, his final disappearance out of this visible world.

We had another instance of complete reformation, in the case of a woman, who was, without exception, the most lawless and daring young person whom we ever found trying conclusions with the authority of the prison officials. She was a handsome dark-eyed girl, lithe and active, possessed of an inexhaustible fund of energy and vigour, of which she made use in every reckless freak she could think of-not excepting a rush into the realms of death whenever the fancy took her to invade his unseen dominion. beginning of her troubles in this life had been a stepmother. That especial relation is a fruitful source of evil and misery to the uncontrolled and undisciplined class which swells the population of our prisons.

The

No. 14, after a few pitched battles with the functionary who occupied that position in her father's house, had departed one dark night from her home, and was seen

of her natural protectors no more. In all the various phases of the wild career on which she entered, she adhered steadfastly to the resolution she had taken that they should never hear of her again, or so much as know whether she were alive or dead. She changed her name, and, delighting in the entire liberty she had achieved, gave all considerations of morals or propriety to the winds, abandoning herself, in fact, to an extremely undesirable mode of existence. She succeeded in committing nearly every offence that could be thought of against the majesty of the law, excepting murder. She was not at all an ill-tempered or covetous woman, and had no animosity against any one, when once safe out of reach of the detested stepmother. Her thefts seemed to be committed rather from a spirit of daring and bravado than from any wish to become possessed of other people's property. Of course she made acquaintanco with the interior of a good many prisons. In one of those, situated at some distance from the jail with which the writer is connected, she perpetrated an escapade of a sufficiently original nature to be published in the newspapers. She had been summoned to the room of the chief female warder to be reprimanded for some of her customary infractions of rule, and when the officer's back was turned for a moment, she sprang like a cat at the window, shivered the glass, forced herself through the bars, and, at the imminent risk of breaking her neck, dropped from a considerable height to the ground. Just at first she lay stunned; but quickly recovering herself, she managed in some unaccountable manner to scale the walls which still intervened between herself and liberty, and the night being

pitch-dark, she got clear away before the officers sent in pursuit could succeed in capturing her. She was dressed in the tell-tale convict clothes, and therefore hurried under cover of the darkness to the house of an acquaintance in one of the lowest parts of the town. There, by fair means or foul, she obtained possession of a suit of men's attire, arrayed herself in it, cut off her long hair, and thus disguised went out into the world in search of fresh adventures. She roamed about at her leisure, having assumed a gruff tone of voice and a swaggering gait, and for a long time no one doubted that she had a right to a place among the lords of the creation; but a misdemeanour of some kind brought her once more into the hands of the police, and then not only was her sex discovered, but her identity also with the prisoner whoso daring escape from prison had been heard of in all directions. Finally, her career of independence terminated in her being brought under a long sentence to our prison.

Will it be believed, after the history we have given of her exploits, that when we last received a letter from No. 14, who kept up a correspondence with us from the time of her release, she wrote out of the cloistered Home of an English Sisterhood,-being herself a professed member of their community, and having, after a severe novitiate, passed to the regular and austere life of a nun, bound by perpetual vows? Yet such is the literal fact; and to those who have had a long experience of the vagaries of human nature in her rank of life, it does not appear so very extraordinary.

No. 14 was really possessed of some very fine qualities underlying her wild impulses, and