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The Green Bag.

other than the Anglican, to which he may belong, and he is watched night and day. From the condemned cell we proceeded to the scaffold chamber, a plain room like a carpenter's workshop, unfurnished except with the apparatus of death, which was then erect and waiting for Neill; one side of the chamber opens out so as to enable repre sentatives of the Press, when they arc admitted, to witness executions. The gal lows itself may deserve a brief description. The primitive gallows was the bough of a tree; a specimen of this type may still be seen at Braemar, in Scotland; the next form was that of a bracket delineated in an old eyre roll (1 Selden Soc. Pub. frontispiece) and perpetuated in Punch and Judy shows; a third form in use at Tyburn during the eighteenth century is sketched in the eleventh plate of Hogarth's " Apprentices," and that used for pirates at Executioner's Dock in plate 5 of the same series. The present gallows, as it stood in Newgate and is used elsewhere, consists of two upright beams with a cross-bar to which a rope of greater or less length, according to the stature of the condemned, is attached by a ring. Under the bar is a trap door, which in Newgate, when we visited it, was level with the floor of the chamber and which is kept in posi tion by a bolt underneath it, which can be instantaneously withdrawn by means of a lever worked from the floor of the chamber; the trap-door opens down into a pit of sufficient depth to allow the convict to dis appear altogether from view when the bolt is drawn. In one corner of the room was a heavy bag of sand with which the execu tioner, after having taken note of Neill's weight, had been making ghoulish experi ments to test the strength of his rope and the necessary "drop" to secure for the convict a painless and instantaneous dis patch. Several other features of interest in New gate were brought under our notice; one

was the prison chapel with grillwork of a curious shape—which compelled the prisoners behind it to look at the preacher and prevented them from seeing their neighbors on the other side—placed in front of the prisoners' benches; another was an under-ground room used for birching juvenile offenders. It is now a settled line of statutory and judicial policy in England to keep this class of offenders out of ordinary prison life, and accordingly, in cases where the law allows it, as in con victions for malicious mischief, young boys are frequently sentenced to receive a few strokes from the birch rod and then to be discharged; this punishment is carried out, in Old Bailey cases, in the room referred to. The delinquent has his limbs placed in two holes in a small wooden erection, like the stump of a tree, set near to the wall, his hands are secured to the upper part of the instrument, and in this posture he receives the prescribed number of strokes from a police constable in the presence of a superior officer and of the parent or guardian of the child, if he desires to be there. The last " view " that we had in Newgate, which it may be worth while bringing under the reader's notice, was of a narrow paved court yard near one of the exits from the prison; its pavement was deeply scored with initials and other marks. These were the epitaphs of generations of malefactors lying beneath; this was the part of " the precincts of the prison " in which the death sentence directs the bodies of executed prisoners to be buried. The preparations for the interment of Neill had already been commenced; a dramatic episode had taken place that morning in connection with them. At the same sessions of the Old Bailey at which Neill was condemned, the sentence of death had also been passed on a Mrs. Dyer, a baby-farming murderess; Mrs. Dyer was placed in a cell near the scaffold chamber to await execution; Neill's turn was to come first. If Mrs. Dyer was kept in her cell she