against a man ugly facts many years old. Many an English pickpocket has discovered this to his cost. At this moment there are six Englishmen and two women who were caught in Paris on the day of the Grand Prix, and who are undergoing thirteen months' imprisonment simply because they presumed on the forgetfulness of the French police. They started for Paris on the day before the race, and a telegram from Scotland Yard heralded their arrival. The police allowed them to go to an hotel in order that they might become chargeable with using false names. As soon as they had entered their aliases on the hotel books they were apprehended, and each got twelve months pour usurpation, and one month pour rupture de ban. They had all been sentenced in Paris for picking pockets three years ago, but had flattered themselves that by coming back under new names they would avoid detection. In may be remarked, in passing, that what makes Paris such a popular hunting ground for English pickpockets is that Frenchmen are accustomed to carry pretty large sums of money in their pockets. The Frenchman seldom banks; he transacts all his business with cash and paper money; and he never takes the numbers of his bank-notes. The power of expulsion, formidable as it is, is not the weightiest of those which the police possesses. A law, whose benefits have been much controverted of late, gives the police absolute authority over women leading notoriously immoral lives. An unfortunate creature who gets into this category is compelled to take out a carte, and to submit herself to periodical medical examinations. A set of rules is laid down for her guidance, and if she transgresses these she may be imprisoned for six months without trial under the mere fat of the inspector who reports her case to the prefect. It is only fair to say that the French police use the irresponsible power thus intrusted to them with considerable discrimination; but it is nevertheless a tremendous power which must be fraught with occasional abuses.

III.

It will be seen from all that precedes that the Prefecture de Police is armed cap-à-pie for contending against crimi

nals; but more remains to be said by way of showing how many are the advantages it has over Scotland Yard. Let us take a glance at the building of the Prefecture itself, which holds the Dépôt to which all persons arrested in Paris are brought.

Every police station in the capital has its cells; but three times a day prison vans come round to clear out the inmates and convey them to the Dépôt. The advantage of thus collecting all offenders at one central police station where the staff of detectives can get a sight of them are obvious. The Dépôt contains about 150 cells for the better class of offenders and for very great criminals, and two large halls with airing yards attached. In the first of these are confined the decently dressed and fairly respectable prisoners; in the others all the tattered and dirty vagabonds who have sunk to the most abject depth of poverty.

In both halls the prisoners live in common, sleeping at nights on tresses laid upon plank beds; and interspersed with them are a number of moutons or spy prisoners, whose business it is to set offenders "blabbing." Every day brings a fresh squad of these moutons, and their true quality is not known even to the prison warders. They are dressed sometimes as fashionable cracksmen, sometimes as beggars; they pass themselves off for burglars, coiners, or petty thieves, according to the work they may have on hand and which consists in pumping" certain men. Who are these queer fish? Not regular detectives, but unattached agents secrets, forming part of that mysterious host of myrmidons whom the Prefect of Police has at his orders and who are paid by the piece. Many of them must be convicts who earn remission of their sentences and doles of canteen-money by acting as spies. As they are only recompensed when they render effective services, their wits grown terribly keen, and they may generally be trusted to twist criminal novices round their little fingers. When a criminal has remained three days at the Dépôt he is sent to the House of Detention (Mazas) and there he often gets a mouton for his cell companion. If this does not suffice to wring the truth out of him the Juge

d'Instruction, or examining magistrate, tries the effect of a little tantalizing and moral torture. The man is forbidden to see his friends or to write to them; he is kept in solitary confinement which may last for months; and he is not allowed to buy any little luxuries with his own money; but once a week the Juge tells him that he shall be allowed to see his friends, to write, smoke, have rations of wine, and eventually obtain a mitigation of his sentence if he tells the truth. So he does tell it at length from sheer weariness. No criminal can hold out long against the system of confinement au secret and private examinations. When a man belongs to a gang of malefactors he is always told that his accomplices have confessed and have thrown all the blame upon him; this makes him furious, he denies, calls his pals "traitors, gives up their names, tells all he knows about them, and thus throws into the hands of the police a number of scamps who but for his revelations might have remained at large.

a

Compare with this system the calm, fair, judicial arrangement under which prisoners are examined in Englandpublicly, and with the aid of counsel if they can afford it. The English prisoner is not even questioned; no hearsay evidence is admitted against him; if it were to transpire that the police had employed a convict to try and wheedle a confession out of him a general clamor of public indignation would arise. But the French prisoner is treated as dangerous beast against whom all's fair. From the moment when he gets into custody the ingenuity of the police is exercised in discovering who he is, in raking up his antecedents, and in framing a case against him out of his own lips. If he be innocent he may yet linger for months and months in prison, because a Juge d'Instruction is an irresponsible official who may take his own time about discharging him under a nolle prosequi. If, on the contrary, the man be guilty, the sentence of the law courts marks him with an indelible stain. Neither time nor repentance can obliterate it. To the end of his life, aye, and after his death, it will remain recorded on the books of the Prefecture and in the registry of his état civil in the commune where he was born,

that in such and such a year he was sent to prison for such and such a crime: and the evidence of this conviction will be open to the inspection of any person who applies for his character. It will stand as a permanent reproach to his children, and his children's children. Years after his death an enemy wishing to pain his descendants may copy the shameful entry from the well-kept registers of the communal Mairie and fling it in their faces.

The admirable system of French police therefore has its drawbacks, apart from those which are produced by petty interferences with the liberty of the sub-~ ject. At an immense cost, by dint of keeping up a staff of secret agents who pervade all classes of society, drawingrooms as well as workshops, and who draw between them about £120,000 from the Secret Service Fund; by dint of registering, pigeon-holing, inspecting, worrying, bullying; by dint of heaping up arbitrary imprisonments and exiles, and treating whole classes of the community as outlaws to be warred against without respite or mercy, the Prefecture certainly does contrive to capture offenders against the law more surely than can be done in England. But what if this precious system have the result of promoting crime to a huge extent by mak ing men who have once fallen under the ban of the law utterly desperate? may strike a statistician with admiration to learn that the registers of the Prefecture are so beautifully kept that they contain no less than 28,000 entries of persons bearing the name of Martin who have got into trouble during the present century; but one would like to know what became of these Martins once they had got placed on the police books? How many of them got enrolled in that hopeless class, who cannot find respectable situations because the records of their état civil is ineffaceably blotted

It

who dare not even marry because in producing their papiers they must bring their wretched antecedents to light? There must have been many of these Martins, who, persecuted and ashamed, joined the ranks of those terrible revolutionary factions who hate the police with a deadly vindictiveness, and who in times of civil war fly to the Prefecture for the purpose of burning it down.

The Prefecture and all it contained was burned by the Communists in 1871, when thousands and thousands of dossiers were destroyed. But the incendiaries forgot that by help of the communal registers most of these records could be recompiled; and they have been. The 28,000 Martins did not purge their antecedents in the flames. All that they ever did amiss has been rewritten in new books which will stand until the Prefecture shall be burned again.

It is no good sign when the masses of a country loathe the police and regard the burning of its records as a popular task which every revolution is bound to perform; neither is it a good sign when the roll of criminals swells and swells as it does in France year by year. What should we say to 51 murders and 101 attempted murders committed in London in the course of a twelvemonth? This was the number of those crimes perpetrated in Paris in the year 1880; and no

less than 31 of them were attempts to murder policemen. Crimes of violence have become so frequent in Paris and France that they seem to indicate an epidemic of moral recklessness among the population; but coupled with other offences they serve at all events to show that a strenuous police system does not do much toward keeping a hot-blooded people quiet and honest. There were 40,351 persons arrested in Paris in 1880, of whom 3216 were foreigners, 36,412 of them were convicted and sentenced, and of this number no less than 13,106 had been convicted before. These figures speak for themselves. They do not compare favorably with the statistics of English crime, and they acquire a gloomy significance when one recollects how many desperate characters were shot down or transported after the Commune, leaving gaps in the criminal ranks, which ought not so soon to have been filled up.-Cornhill Magazine.

THRAWN

THE Reverend Murdoch Soulis was long minister of the moorland parish of Balweary, in the vale of Dule. A se vere, bleak-faced old man, dreadful to his hearers, he dwelt in the last years of his life, without relative or servant or any human company, in the small and lonely manse under the Hanging Shaw. In spite of the iron composure of his features, his eye was wild, scared, and uncertain; and when he dwelt, in private admonitions, on the future of the impenitent, it seemed as if his eye pierced through the storms of time to the terrors of eternity. Many young persons, coming to prepare themselves against the season of the Holy Communion, were dreadfully affected by his talk. He had a sermon on 1 Peter 5: 8, The devil as a roaring lion,' on the Sunday after every seventeenth of August, and he was accustomed to surpass himself upon that text both by the appalling nature of the matter and the terror of his bearing in the pulpit. The children were frightened into fits, and the old looked more than usually oracular, and were, all that day, full of those hints that Hamlet deprecated. The manse itself, where it stood by the

44

JANET.

water of Dule among some thick trees, with the Shaw overhanging it on the one side, and on the other many cold, moorish hilltops rising toward the sky, had begun, at a very early period of Mr. Soulis's ministry, to be avoided in the dusk hours by all who valued themselves upon their prudence; and gudemen sitting at the clachan alehouse shook their heads together at the thought of passing late by that uncanny neighborhood. There was one spot, to be more particular, which was regarded with especial awe. The manse stood between the high road and the water of Dule, with a gable to each; its back was toward the kirktown of Balweary, nearly half a mile away; in front of it, a bare garden, hedged with thorn, occupied the land between the river and the road. The house was two stories high, with two large rooms on each. It opened not directly on the garden, but on a causewayed path, or passage, giving on the road on the one hand, and closed on the other by the tall willows and elders that bordered on the stream. And it was this strip of causeway that enjoyed among the young parishioners of Balweary so infamous a reputation

The minister walked there often after dark, sometimes groaning aloud in the instancy of his unspoken prayers; and when he was from home, and the manse door was locked, the more daring schoolboys ventured, with beating hearts, to "follow my leader' across that legendary spot.

This atmosphere of terror; surrounding, as it did, a man of God of spotless character and orthodoxy, was a common cause of wonder and subject of inquiry among the few strangers who were led by chance or business into that unknown, outlying country. But many even of the people of the parish were ignorant of the strange events which had marked the first year of Mr. Soulis's ministra tions; and among those who were better informed, some were naturally reticent and others shy of that particular topic. Now and again, only, one of the older folk would warm into courage over his third tumbler, and recount the cause of the minister's strange looks and solitary life.

Fifty years syne, when Mr. Soulis cam' first into Ba'weary, he was still a young man-a callant, the folk said-fu' o' book learnin' and grand at the exposition, but, as was natural in sae young a man, wi' nae leevin' experience in religion. The younger sort were greatly taken wi' his gifts and his gab; but auld, concerned, serious men and women were moved even to prayer for the young man, whom they took to be a self-deceiver, and the parish that was like to be sae ill-supplied. It was before the days o' the moderates-weary fa' them; but ill things are like gude -they baith come bit by bit, a pickle at a time; and there were folk even then that said the Lord had left the college professors to their ain devices, an' the lads that went to study wi' them wad hae done mair and better sittin' in a peat-bog, like their forbears of the persecution, wi' a Bible under their oxter and a speerit o' prayer in their heart. There was nae doot, onyway, but that Mr. Soulis had been ower lang at the college. He was careful and troubled for mony things besides the ae thing needful. He had a feck o' books wi' him-mair than had ever been seen before in a' that presbytery; and a sair

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wark the carrier had wi' them. they were a' like to have smoored in the Deil's Hag between this and Kilmakerlie. They were books o' divinity, to be sure, or so they ca'd them; but the serious were o' opinion there was little service for sae mony, when the hail o' God's Word could gang in the neuk of a plaid. Then, he wad sit half the day. and half the nicht forbye (which was scant decent) writing, nae less; and first, they were feared he wad read his sermons; and syne it proved he was writin' a book himsel', which was surely no fittin' for ane of his years an' sma' experience.

Onyway it behoved him to get an auld, decent wife to keep the manse for him an' see to his bit denners; and he was recommended to an auld limmer

Janet M'Clour, they ca'd her-and sae far left to himsel' as to be ower persuaded. There was mony advised him to the contrar', for Janet was mair than suspeckit by the best folk in Ba'weary. Lang or that, she had had a wean to a dragoon; she hadnae come forrit* for maybe thretty years; and bairns had seen her mumblin' to hersel' upon Key's Loan in the gloamin', whilk was an unco time an' place for a God-fearin' woman. Howsoever, it was the laird himsel' that had first tauld the minister o' Janet; and in thae days he wad have gane a far gate to pleesure the laird. When folk tauld him that Janet was sib to the deil, it was all superstition by his way of it; an' when they cast up the Bible to him an' the witch of Endor, he wad threep it doun their thrapples that thir days were a' gane by, and the deil was mercifully restrained.

Weel, when it got about the clachan that Janet M'Clour was to be servant at the manse, the folk were fair mad wi' her an' him thegether; and some o' the gudewives had nae better to dae than get round her door cheeks and chairge her wi' a' that was ken't again her, frae the sodger's bairn to John Tamson's twa kye. She was nae great speaker ; folk usually let her gang her ain gate, an' she let them gang theirs, wi' neither Fair-gude-een nor Fair-gude-day; but when she buckled to, she had a tongue

* To come forrit-to offer oneself as a communicant.

to deave the miller. Up she got, an' there wasnae an auld story in Ba'weary but she gart somebody loup for it that day; they couldnae say ae thing but she could say twa to it; till, at the hinder end, the gudewives up and claught haud of her, and clawed the coats off her back, and pu'd her doun the clachan to the water o' Dule, to see if she were a witch or no, soum or droun. The carline skirled till ye could hear her at the Hangin' Shaw, and she focht like ten; there was mony a gudewife bure the mark of her neist day an' mony a lang day after; and just in the hettest o' the collieshangie, wha suld come up (for his sins) but the new minister.

Women," said he (and he had a grand voice), "I charge you in the Lord's name to let her go.'

Janet ran to him-she was fair wud wi' terror-an' clang to him, an' prayed him, for Christ's sake, save her frae the cummers; an' they, for their pairt, tauld him a' that was ken't, and maybe mair.

"Woman," says he to Janet, "is this true ?"

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"As the Lord sees me,' says she, as the Lord made me, no a word o't. Forbye the bairn," says she, "I've been a decent woman a' my days." "Will you, says Mr. Soulis, "in the name of God, and before me, His unworthy minister, renounce the devil and his works?''

Weel, it wad appear that when he askit that, she gave a girn that fairly frichtit them that saw her, an' they could hear her teeth play dirl thegether in her chafts; but there was naething for it but the oe way or the ither; an' Janet lifted up her hand and renounced the deil before them a'.

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Any now," says Mr. Soulis to the gudewives, home with ye, one and all, and pray to God for His forgiveness.

And he gied Janet his arm, though she had little on her but a sark, and took her up the clachan to her ain door like a leddy of the land; an' her scrieghin' and laughin' as was a scandal to be heard.

There were mony grave folk lang ower their prayers that nicht; but when the morn cam' there was sic a fear fell upon a' Ba'weary that the bairns hid theirsels, and e'en the men folk stood

and keeckit frae their doors. For there was Janet comin' doun the clachan-her or her likeness, nane coud tell-wi' her neck thrawn, and her heid on ae side, like a body that has been hangit, and a girn on her face like an unstreakit corp. By an' by they got used wi' it, and even speered at her to ken what was wrang; but frae that day forth she couldnae speak like a Christian woman, but slavered and played click wi' her teeth like a pair o' shears; and frae that day forth the name o' God cam' never on her lips. Whiles she wad try to say it, but it nichtnae be. Them that kenned best said least; but they never gied that Thing the name o' Janet M'Clour; for the auld Janet, by their way o't, was in muckle hell that day. But the minister was neither to haud nor to bind; he preached aboot naething but the folk's cruelty that had gi'en her a stroke o' the palsy; he skelpt the bairns that meddled her; and he had her up to the manse that same nicht, and dwalled there a' his lane wi' her under the Hangin' Shaw.

Weel, time gaed by; and the idler sort commenced to think mair lichtly o' that black business. The minister was weel thought o'; he was aye late at the writing, folk wad see his can'le doon by the Dule water after twal' at e'en; and he seemed aye pleased wi' himsel' and upsitten as at first, though a' body could see that he was dwining. As for Janet, she cam' an' she gaed; if she didnae speak muckle afore, it was reason she should speak less then; she meddled naebody, but she was an eldritch thing to see, an' nane wad hae mistrysted wi’ her for Ba'weary glebe.

About the end o' July there cam' a spell o' weather, the like o't never was in that country side; it was lown an' het an' heartless; the herds couldnae win up the Black Hill, the bairns were ower weariet to play; an' yet it was gousty too wi' claps o' het wund that rumm'led in the glens, and bits o' shooers that slockened naething. We aye thocht it but to thun'er on the morn; but the morn cam', an' the morn's morning, and it was aye the same uncanny weather, sair on folks and bestial. Of a' that were the waur, nane suffered like Mr. Soulis; he could neither sleep nor eat, he tauld his eld