tunate fellows could look forward to a joyous gallows,
with possibilities beyond, from which Hell had been officially excluded.
It is but right to add that the Reverend Father did _not_ ascribe the
exultant satisfaction of his clients--if that is the word--to anything
but the anticipation of escape from torture. He was too truthful.

If the nearest dates the story has obtained are trustworthy, Daverill's
actual term in Norfolk Island may have been fourteen years; it certainly
came to an end in the early forties. But he must have been there at the
time of the above incident, as it happened _circa_ 1836-37. The powers
of the sea-girt tropical Paradise to sterilise every Divine impulse must
have been at their best in his time, and he seems to have been a
favourable subject for the _virus_ of diabolism, which was got by Good
Intentions out of Expediency. The latter must have been carrying on with
Cowardice, though, to account for Respectability's choice, for her
convicts, of an excruciating life rather than a painless death. Possibly
the Cowardice of the whole Christian world, which accounts Death the
greatest of possible evils.

The life of a bushranger in New South Wales, which fills in the end of
his Australian career, did not tend to the development of any stray germ
of a soul that the prison-fires had not scorched out of old Maisie's
son. Small wonder it was so! Conceive the glorious freedom of wickedness
unrestrained, after the stived-up atmosphere of the gaol, with its
maddening Sunday chapel and its hideous possibilities of public torture
for any revolt against the unendurable routine. We, nowadays, read with
a shudder of the enormities that were common in the prisons of past
times--we, who only know of their modern substitutes. For the last
traces of torture, such as was common long after the _moyen age_, as
generally understood, have vanished from the administration of our gaols
before a vivified spirit of Christianity, and the enlightenment
consequent on the Advance of Science.[A] After fourteen years of such a
life, how glorious must have been the opportunities the freedom of the
Bush afforded to an instinctive miscreant, still in the prime of life,
and artificially debarred for so long from the indulgence of a natural
bent for wickedness; not yet _ennuye_ by the monotony of crime in
practice, which often leads to a reaction, occasionally accompanied by
worldly success. There was, however, about Daverill a redee