solemnly the fervid songs of the Revolution; and at five in the morning, when their summons came, one of them rose and declaimed the Marseillaise. Then the twenty-two went chanting to the scaffold, bearing their dead comrade among them, and the chant was maintained until the last head had fallen.

66

"

The transition, I fear, is abrupt, but the suspects " of the Terror have brought into my mind the suspects" of Kilmainham during the Irish troubles of 1881. Here again was a prison entirely transformed-but there was noguillotine running red on College Green. Here was no Last Supper of the Girondins, but a perpetual table excellently furnished from the purses of the Ladies' Land League. The great central hall of the prison, one of the finest in the kingdom, was converted into a day-room for the motley crowd of Members of Parliament, priests, doctors, lawyers, journalists, clerks, farmers, tradesmen, cattle-dealers, and peasants imprisoned under the "Crimes Act." There was little restraint over them, and they enjoyed privileges which the "convicted prisoner " knows nothing of. They wrote and received as many letters as they pleased; newspapers, books, magazines, chess-boards, draught-boards, backgammon-boards, and packs of cards were supplied to them; they had flowers and wines on their table; a yard of the prison was laid with concrete

to serve as a ball-alley; and the cells were changed into neat little bedrooms. Altogether, it was partly a joke for many of the "suspects,' but not so amusing to the governor and his staff, who had no precedents for the administration of prison on the lines of a fashionable boarding-house.

Restrictions in the matter of speech have varied under most penal systems. In one prison, and at one period, speech is free and unrestrained; in another prison, and at some other time, it is rigorously curtailed or entirely forbidden. Prisoners sharing rooms in the old State prisons, or who were accorded what was called "the liberty of the yard," might talk without stint, as in the yards and association-rooms of old Newgate; but there was always the moral restraint arising from the suspicion that one prisoner might be acting as a spy upon the others. This was often the real case, when a secret was wanted from a person under detention. On the other hand, State prisoners were often mewed up so closely and cruelly that they could neither speak nor be spoken to. Out of such situations spring the systems of secret communication between prisoners in separate confinement, which nearly all prisons have revealed. A favourite, and perhaps the most universal method, is a code of taps, open as this is to the objection that taps may be conveyed to other

ears than those they are intended to inform. In the Bastille in the eighteenth century, and doubtless earlier, the manière de parler du bâton, or mode of conversing by taps, was as follows: the prisoner struck the wall or the ceiling of his cell (according to the position of his neighbour) once for the letter a, twice for b, three times for c, and so on to z, represented by twenty-four strokes. Thus, food would be spelled: six taps, followed by fifteen, followed by fifteen, followed by four. It seems laborious in the extreme, yet Constantin de Renneville assures us that prisoners became so apt at the manœuvre as to succeed in carrying on long conversations, easily and with rapidity, despite the thickness of the walls, the vigilance of the sentinels, and the anger of the turnkeys. M. Tikhomirov gives a diagram of the telegraphic code in use among the prisoners of St. Peter and St. Paul.

The reader will master it with scarcely an

effort. Here there are two sets of taps for each

letter; the first set indicates the series in which the letter is found, the second marks the place of the letter in that series. Prison, for instance, would be rapped out in this manner: four strokes and one (p), four strokes and three (r), two strokes and four (i), four strokes and four (s), three strokes and five (o), three strokes and four (n). "When you have accustomed yourself to it," says M. Tikhomirov, "this kind of telegraph serves you for conversation on any subject, and in a little while you can guess a word by three letters. I got so used to this language that I could even recognise my correspondents by the way they rapped, just as if I were listening to their voices. More than this: I could tell their moods-if they were cheery, out of heart, or in a temper. Yet more I came to know by-and-by whether it were a man or a woman who was speaking to me. The women rapped so quickly that I could scarcely follow them, and over and over again I had to entreat my neighbour to take her time (et toujours je devais supplier ma voisine de ne pas tant se hâter)."

A modification of the French and Russian systems is in surreptitious use in every English prison at the present day. The testimony is gathered with most authority from the evidence given to the Departmental Committee on Prisons, 1895. An ex-prisoner, "Mr. D—,” explained the method of telegraphing by a tattoo on the

wall: "Even if a fresh man enters a cell, if he sees there is a man in the next cell to him, perhaps this man will give a rat-tat on the wall, and he will let him know how long he has got. The other man, perhaps, will answer on the wall by so many knocks; if it is days he will go through the whole of the days; if it is months he will knock the number of the months, but if it were seven days he would knock seven days on the wall."

Asked again, if he had any difficulty in making communications :

"No. In my experience (and I look back on it now after being out for four years) I feel that, no matter how stringent the rules may be in prison, it would be utterly impossible to keep prisoners from communicating in some way or other, if it is only with the fingers. I can give you an instance of it. If a new man enters the prison, it might be only in the exercise yard, but if that man has twelve months he would simply put his finger to his ear. If he has six months he would clench his hand. It is a sort of alphabet that seems to get known."

The touching of the ear, if it be considered for a moment, is a natural piece of symbolism (ear year). Touching both ears signifies two years. The code goes beyond this. Old hands

=

talk together, without opening their mouths,