"However," he continued, "I shall put you on third-class diet at once, and order you a mattress." What the third-class diet was the reader shall learn presently.

The second-class diet, which I should otherwise have had for the first month, consists of nothing but bread and sloppy meal-and-water, three times a day.

Mr.Kemp had to put up with this wretched fare for a while, and he tells me he was ravenously hungry morning and night, so that it was a luxury to pick up a chance piece of bread from a dinner-tin in the corridor or from a friendly prisoner "off his feed." Bathing, clothing, and doctoring over, we were marched back to our cells, each loaded with a new mattress and a pair of clean sheets.

A few minutes later I was summoned to the schoolroom with Mr.Ramsey, where we were furnished with pen and ink and a sheet of foolscap to write our "petition" to the Home Secretary.

The schoolmaster officiated on this occasion.