Difficulties occur often.  Impossibilities will bar the way now and then; but there are so few real impossibilities.  When a difficulty arises, the three hundred industrious arts and crafts are freely ransacked for a prisoner; ay!—­ransacked as few rich men would be bothered to sift the seven or eight liberal professions in order to fit a beloved son.

Here, as in the world, the average of talent is low.  The majority can only learn easy things, and vulgar things, and some can do higher things and a few can do beautiful things, and one or two have developed first-rate gifts and powers.

There are 25 shoemakers (male); 12 tailors, of whom 6 female; 24 weavers, of whom 10 female; 4 watchmakers, all female; 6 printers and composers, 5 female; 4 engrainers of wood, 2 female. (In this art we have the first artist in Britain, our old acquaintance, Thomas Robinson.  He has passed all his competitors by a simple process.  Beautiful specimens of all the woods have been placed and kept before him, and for a month he has been forced to imitate nature with his eye never off her.  His competitors in the world imitate nature from memory, from convention, or from tradition.  By such processes truth and beauty are lost at each step down the ladder of routine.  Mr. Eden gave clever Tom at first starting the right end of the stick, instead of letting him take the wrong.) Nine joiners and carpenters, 3 female; 3 who color prints downright well, 1 female; 2 painters, 1 female; 3 pupils shorthand writing, 1 female.

[Fancy these attending the Old Bailey and taking it all down solemn as judges.]

Workers in gutta-percha, modelers in clay, washers and getters-up of linen, hoe-makers, spade-makers, rake-makers, woodcarvers, stonecutters, bakers, etc., etc., etc., ad infinitum.  Come to the hard-labor yard.  Do you see those fifteen stables? there lurk in vain the rusty cranks; condemned first as liars they fell soon after into disrepute as weapons of half-science to degrade minds and bodies.  They lurk there grim as the used-up giants in “Pilgrim’s Progress,” and like them can’t catch a soul.

Hark to the music of the shuttle and the useful loom.  We weave linen, cotton, woolen, linsey-woolsey, and, not to be behind the rogues outside, cottonsey-woolsey and cottonsey-silksey; damask we weave, and a little silk and poplin, and Mary Baker velvet itself for a treat now and then.  We of the loom relieve the county of all expense in keeping us, and enrich a fund for taking care of discharged industrious prisoners until such time as they can soften prejudices and obtain lucrative employment.  The old plan was to kick a prisoner out and say: 

“There, dog! go without a rap among those who will look on you as a dog and make you starve or steal.  We have taught you no labor but crank, and as there are no cranks in the outside world, the world not being such an idiot as we are, you must fill your belly by means of the only other thing you have ever been taught—­theft.”