was engaged, who assisted in the duties at the lodge, and kept a small shop “between gates,” where tea, sugar, and other little comforts could be purchased by the prisoners out of their prison earnings.  This step was a successful one, for with the decrease of temptation from without, came an increase of comfort from within, provided they earned money and obeyed rules.  Plenty of work could be done, seeing that they all required more or less clothing, while Botany Bay could take any number of garments to be utilized for the members of the penal settlement there.

Two months after Lord Lansdowne’s motion was made in Parliament, Mrs. Fry, together with Joseph John Gurney, his wife, and her own daughter, Rachel, went into Scotland on a religious and philanthropic tour.  The chief object of this journey seems to have been the visitation of Friends’ Meetings in that part of the kingdom; but the prison enterprise was by no means forgotten.  In her journal she records visits to meetings of Friends held at Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool and Knowsley.  At the latter place they were guests of the Earl of Derby, and much enjoyed the palatial hospitality which greeted them.  They made a point of visiting most of the jails and bridewells in the towns through which they passed, finding in some of them horrors far surpassing anything that Newgate could have shown them even in its unreformed days.  At Haddington four cells, allotted to prisoners of the tramp and criminal class, were “very dark, excessively dirty, had clay floors, no fire-places, straw in one corner for a bed, and in each of them a tub, the receptacle for all filth.”  Iron bars were used upon the prisoners so as to become instruments of torture.  In one cell was a poor young man who was a lunatic—­whence nobody knew.  He had been subject to the misery and torture of Haddington jail for eighteen months, without once leaving his cell for an airing.  No clothes were allowed, no medical man attended those who were incarcerated, and a chaplain never entered there, while the prison itself was destitute of any airing-yard.  The poor debtors, whether they were few or many, were all confined in one small cell not nine feet square, where one little bed served for all.

At Kinghorn, Fifeshire, a young laird had languished in a state of madness for six years in the prison there, and had at last committed suicide.  Poor deranged human nature flew to death as a remedy against torture.  At Forfar, prisoners were chained to the bedstead; at Berwick, to the walls of their cells; and at Newcastle to a ring in the floor.  The two most objectionable features in Scotch prisons, as appears from Mr. Gurney’s “Notes” of this tour, were the treatment of debtors, and the cruelties used to lunatics.  Both these classes of individuals were confined as criminals, and treated with the utmost cruelty.