that shirts
are worn a week in summer, and (as well as drawers) two or three weeks
in winter, it will at once be conceded that some farther provision for
personal cleanliness is imperatively demanded. I hope neither this nor
any other remark I may think fit to make will be taken as emanating from
a fault-finding spirit, since, while I pronounce upon the disease, I
suggest the remedy."

Speaking of his companions, he says:--

"I had expected to find myself linked with a band of most outrageous
ruffians, but such did not prove to be the case. Few of them were
decidedly of a vicious temperament. The great fault with them seemed to
be a want of moral knowledge and principle. Were I to commit a theft I
should think myself unworthy to live an instant; but some of them spoke
of the felonies for which they were adjudged to suffer with as much
_nonchalance_ as if they were the every-day business of life, without
scruple and without shame. Few of them denied the justice of their
sentences; and if they expressed any regret, it was not that they had
sinned, but that they had been detected. The duration of the sentence,
the time or money lost, the physical suffering, was what filled their
estimate of their condition. Many had groans and oaths for a lost
dinner, a night in the cells, or a tough piece of work, but none had a
tear for the branding infamy of their conviction. Yet some, even of the
most hardened, faltered, and spoke with quivering lip and glistening
eye, when they thought of their parents, wives, and children. The
flinty Horeb of their souls sometimes yielded gushing streams to the
force of that appeal. But there were very few who felt any shame on
their own account. Their apathy on the point of honour was amazing. A
young man, not twenty-five years old, in particular, made his felonies
his glory, and boasted that he had been a tenant of half the prisons in
the United States. He was sentenced to four years' imprisonment for
stealing a great number of pieces of broadcloth, which he unblushingly
told me he had lodged in the hands of a receiver of stolen goods, and
expected to receive the value at the expiration of his sentence. He
relied on the proverbial `honour among thieves.' That fellow ought to
be kept in safe custody the remainder of his natural life."

Certainly those remarks do not argue much for the reformation of the
culprit.

By his account, a parsimony in every point appears to be the great