shly administered thirty years ago than
now, and on my twenty-third birthday I found myself chained as a felon
with thirty-seven other convicts in 'tween-decks of the bark _Gloria
Scott_, bound for Australia.

"'It was the year '55 when the Crimean war was at its height, and the
old convict ships had been largely used as transports in the Black
Sea. The government was compelled, therefore, to use smaller and less
suitable vessels for sending out their prisoners. The Gloria Scott
had been in the Chinese tea-trade, but she was an old-fashioned,
heavy-bowed, broad-beamed craft, and the new clippers had cut her
out. She was a five-hundred-ton boat; and besides her thirty-eight
jail-birds, she carried twenty-six of a crew, eighteen soldiers, a
captain, three mates, a doctor, a chaplain, and four warders. Nearly a
hundred souls were in her, all told, when we set sail from Falmouth.

"'The partitions between the cells of the convicts, instead of being of
thick oak, as is usual in convict-ships, were quite thin and frail.
The man next to me, upon the aft side, was one whom I had particularly
noticed when we were led down the quay. He was a young man with a
clear, hairless face, a long, thin nose, and rather nut-cracker jaws.
He carried his head very jauntily in the air, had a swaggering style
of walking, and was, above all else, remarkable for his extraordinary
height. I don't think any of our heads would have come up to his
shoulder, and I am sure that he could not have measured less than six
and a half feet. It was strange among so many sad and weary faces to see
one which was full of energy and resolution. The sight of it was to me
like a fire in a snow-storm. I was glad, then, to find that he was my
neighbor, and gladder still when, in the dead of the night, I heard a
whisper close to my ear, and found that he had managed to cut an opening
in the board which separated us.

"'"Hullo, chummy!" said he, "what's your name, and what are you here
for?"

"'I answered him, and asked in turn who I was talking with.

"'"I'm Jack Prendergast," said he, "and by God! You'll learn to bless my
name before you've done with me."

"'I remembered hearing of his case, for it was one which had made an
immense sensation throughout the country some time before my own arrest.
He was a man of good family and of great ability, but of incurably
vicious habits, who had by an ingenious system of fraud obtained huge
sums of money from the leading