One afternoon ever-active semaphores transmitted a piece of intelligence which set the peninsula agog. Captain Frere, having arrived from head-quarters, with orders to hold an inquiry into the death of Kirkland, was not unlikely to make a progress through the stations, and it behoved the keepers of the Natural Penitentiary to produce their Penitents in good case. Burgess was in high spirits at finding so congenial a soul selected for the task of reporting upon him.

“It’s only a nominal thing, old man,” Frere said to his former comrade, when they met. “That parson has made meddling, and they want to close his mouth.”

“I am glad to have the opportunity of showing you and Mrs. Frere the place,” returned Burgess. “I must try and make your stay as pleasant as I can, though I’m afraid that Mrs. Frere will not find much to amuse her.”

“Frankly, Captain Burgess,” said Sylvia, “I would rather have gone straight to Sydney. My husband, however, was obliged to come, and of course I accompanied him.”

“You will not have much society,” said Meekin, who was of the welcoming party. “Mrs. Datchett, the wife of one of our stipendiaries, is the only lady here, and I hope to have the pleasure of making you acquainted with her this evening at the Commandant’s . Mr. McNab, whom you know, is in command at the Neck, and cannot leave, or you would have seen him.”

“I have planned a little party,” said Burgess, “but I fear that it will not be so successful as I could wish.”

“You wretched old bachelor,” said Frere; “you should get married, like me.”

“Ah!” said Burgess, with a bow, “that would be difficult.”

Sylvia was compelled to smile at the compliment, made in the presence of some twenty prisoners, who were carrying the various trunks and packages up the hill, and she remarked that the said prisoners grinned at the Commandant’s clumsy courtesy. “I don’t like Captain Burgess, Maurice,” she said, in the interval before dinner. “I dare say he did flog that poor fellow to death. He looks as if he could do it.”

“Nonsense!” said Maurice, pettishly; “he’s a good fellow enough. Besides, I’ve seen the doctor’s certificate. It’s a trumped-up story. I can’t understand your absurd sympathy with prisoners.”

“Don’t they sometimes deserve sympathy?”

“No, certainly not — a set of lying scoundrels. You are always whining over them, Sylvia. I don’t like it, and I’ve told you before about it.”

Sylvia said nothing. Maurice was often guilty of these small brutalities, and she had learnt that the best way to meet them was by silence. Unfortunately, silence did not mean indifference, for the reproof was unjust, and nothing stings a woman’s fine sense like an injustice. Burgess had prepared a feast, and the “Society” of Port Arthur was present. Father Flaherty, Meekin, Doctor Macklewain, and Mr. and Mrs. Datchett had been invited, and the dining-room was resplendent with glass and flowers.

“I’ve a fellow who was a professional gardener,” said Burgess to Sylvia during the dinner, “and I make use of his talents.”

“We have a professional artist also,” said Macklewain, with a sort of pride. “That picture of the ‘Prisoner of Chillon’ yonder was painted by him. A very meritorious production, is it not?”

“I’ve got the place full of curiosities,” said Burgess; “quite a collection. I’ll show them to you to-morrow. Those napkin rings were made by a prisoner.”

“Ah!” cried Frere, taking up the daintily-carved bone, “very neat!”

“That is some of Rex’s handiwork,” said Meekin. “He is very clever at these trifles. He made me a paper-cutter that was really a work of art.”

“We will go down to the Neck to-morrow or next day, Mrs. Frere,” said Burgess, “and you shall see the Blow-hole. It is a curious place.”

“Is it far?” asked Sylvia.

“Oh no! We shall go in the train.”

“The train!”

“Yes — don’t look so astonished. You’ll see it to-morrow. Oh, you Hobart Town ladies don’t know what we can do here.”

“What about this Kirkland business?” Frere asked. “I suppose I can have half an hour with you in the morning, and take the depositions?”

“Any time you like, my dear fellow,” said Burgess. “It’s all the same to me.”

“I don’t want to make more fuss than I can help,” Frere said apologetically — the dinner had been good —“but I must send these people up a ‘full, true and particular’, don’t you know.”

“Of course,” cried Burgess, with friendly nonchalance. “That’s all right. I want Mrs. Frere to see Point Puer.”

“Where the boys are?” asked Sylvia.

“Exactly. Nearly three hundred of ’em. We’ll go down to-morrow, and you shall be my witness, Mrs. Frere, as to the way they are treated.”

“Indeed,” said Sylvia, protesting, “I would rather not. I— I don’t take the interest in these things that I ought, perhaps. They are very dreadful to me.”

“Nonsense!” said Frere, with a scowl. “We’ll come, Burgess, of course.” The next two days were devoted to sight-seeing. Sylvia was taken through the hospital and the workshops, shown the semaphores, and shut up by Maurice in a “dark cell”. Her husband and Burgess seemed to treat the prison like a tame animal, whom they could handle at their leisure, and whose natural ferocity was kept in check by their superior intelligence. This bringing of a young and pretty woman into immediate contact with bolts and bars had about it an incongruity which pleased them. Maurice penetrated everywhere, questioned the prisoners, jested with the gaolers, even, in the munificence of his heart, bestowed tobacco on the sick.

With such graceful rattlings of dry bones, they got by and by to Point Puer, where a luncheon had been provided.

An unlucky accident had occurred at Point Puer that morning, however, and the place was in a suppressed ferment. A refractory little thief named Peter Brown, aged twelve years, had jumped off the high rock and drowned himself in full view of the constables. These “jumpings off” had become rather frequent lately, and Burgess was enraged at one happening on this particular day. If he could by any possibility have brought the corpse of poor little Peter Brown to life again, he would have soundly whipped it for its impertinence.

“It is most unfortunate,” he said to Frere, as they stood in the cell where the little body was laid, “that it should have happened to-day.”

“Oh,” says Frere, frowning down upon the young face that seemed to smile up at him. “It can’t be helped. I know those young devils. They’d do it out of spite. What sort of a character had he?”

“Very bad — Johnson, the book.”

Johnson bringing it, the two saw Peter Brown’s iniquities set down in the neatest of running hand, and the record of his punishments ornamented in quite an artistic way with flourishes of red ink

“20th November, disorderly conduct, 12 lashes. 24th November, insolence to hospital attendant, diet reduced. 4th December, stealing cap from another prisoner, 12 lashes. 15th December, absenting himself at roll call, two days’ cells. 23rd December, insolence and insubordination, two days’ cells. 8th January, insolence and insubordination, 12 lashes. 20th January, insolence and insubordination, 12 lashes. 22nd February, insolence and insubordination, 12 lashes and one week’s solitary. 6th March, insolence and insubordination, 20 lashes.”

“That was the last?” asked Frere.

“Yes, sir,” says Johnson.

“And then he — hum — did it?”

“Just so, sir. That was the way of it.”

Just so! The magnificent system starved and tortured a child of twelve until he killed himself. That was the way of it.

After luncheon the party made a progress. Everything was most admirable. There was a long schoolroom, where such men as Meekin taught how Christ loved little children; and behind the schoolroom were the cells and the constables and the little yard where they gave their “twenty lashes”. Sylvia shuddered at the array of faces. From the stolid nineteen years old booby of the Kentish hop-fields, to the wizened, shrewd, ten years old Bohemian of the London streets, all degrees and grades of juvenile vice grinned, in untameable wickedness, or snuffed in affected piety. “Suffer little children to come unto Me, and forbid them not, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven,” said, or is reported to have said, the Founder of our Established Religion. Of such it seemed that a large number of Honourable Gentlemen, together with Her Majesty’s faithful commons in Parliament assembled, had done their best to create a Kingdom of Hell .

After the farce had been played again, and the children had stood up and sat down, and sung a hymn, and told how many twice five were, and repeated their belief in “One God the Father Almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth”, the party reviewed the workshops, and saw the church, and went everywhere but into the room where the body of Peter Brown, aged twelve, lay starkly on its wooden bench, staring at the gaol roof which was between it and Heaven.

Just outside this ro............