comfort in store for her. It is not by any means that such men always prove unkind husbands, but the associations that such marriages bring with them cannot fail to entail misery upon decent women. Let anyone suppose herself surrounded with acquaintances whose every-day language it is of itself a real calamity to hear, and whose countenances partake more or less of a likeness to such vagrants as one would dislike to meet alone in a narrow lane, and some sort of notion may then be had of the visiting list of a convict in Western Australia. In other society marriage gives a man the opportunity of dropping undesirable acquaintanceships, but there seems no possibility of ever being rid of those which have been formed in jail; they have a tenacity which better friendships sometimes lack.
One of the heaviest parts of a convict's punishment, offering also the severest hindrance to his reformation, is that he has it not in his power to shake himself so entirely free from old companions as that they shall never enter his doors; he cannot, if he would, in a penal settlement stand altogether aloof from the class with which crime has identified him, and the meeting of former associates ends too often in the hatching of new offences. Then comes reconviction, and the wife must shift for herself whilst the husband spends a fresh term in jail. If she is a Roman Catholic the opportunity of the husband's absence, for a fixed and definite period, is perhaps utilized for sending the child or children to a school of her own faith, at the probable cost to herself of a beating when the head of the family is liberated, for, as if there were not already sufficient seeds of discord in a body of men made up of waifs
