ught passed through his brain, his eye fell upon the
"notorious Dawes", who, while waiting for the schooner to take him back
to Port Arthur, had been permitted to amuse himself by breaking stones.
The prison-shed which Mr. Meekin was visiting was long and low, roofed
with iron, and terminating at each end in the stone wall of the gaol. At
one side rose the cells, at the other the outer wall of the prison. From
the outer wall projected a weatherboard under-roof, and beneath this
were seated forty heavily-ironed convicts. Two constables, with loaded
carbines, walked up and down the clear space in the middle, and another
watched from a sort of sentry-box built against the main wall. Every
half-hour a third constable went down the line and examined the irons.
The admirable system of solitary confinement--which in average cases
produces insanity in the space of twelve months--was as yet unknown in
Hobart Town, and the forty heavily-ironed men had the pleasure of seeing
each other's faces every day for six hours.

The other inmates of the prison were at work on the roads, or otherwise
bestowed in the day time, but the forty were judged too desperate to be
let loose. They sat, three feet apart, in two long lines, each man with
a heap of stones between his outstretched legs, and cracked the pebbles
in leisurely fashion. The double row of dismal woodpeckers tapping at
this terribly hollow beech-tree of penal discipline had a semi-ludicrous
appearance. It seemed so painfully absurd that forty muscular men should
be ironed and guarded for no better purpose than the cracking of a
cartload of quartz-pebbles. In the meantime the air was heavy with angry
glances shot from one to the other, and the passage of the parson
was hailed by a grumbling undertone of blasphemy. It was considered
fashionable to grunt when the hammer came in contact with the stone, and
under cover of this mock exclamation of fatigue, it was convenient
to launch an oath. A fanciful visitor, seeing the irregularly rising
hammers along the line, might have likened the shed to the interior of
some vast piano, whose notes an unseen hand was erratically fingering.
Rufus Dawes was seated last on the line--his back to the cells, his face
to the gaol wall. This was the place nearest the watching constable,
and was allotted on that account to the most ill-favoured. Some of his
companions envied him that melancholy distinction.

"Well, Dawes," says Mr. Meekin, measuring wit