The bench took a righteous view of the question, and our hero simply got his deserts.
He, however, endeavoured to make out that he was an ill-used man.
After the sessions had come to a conclusion, he was taken in the prison van with a batch of convicts to the gaol where they were to undergo the first probationary term of their sentences.
With a heavy heart, Peace once more entered the “Black Maria,” which was to convey him to a convict establishment, with which he had never had any previous acquaintance.
When the prison van arrived at its destination the convicts were told to alight.
The first thing on entering the prison, each man was released from his handcuffs, and told to seat himself on a long bench in the passage.
Peace, during the progress of the van through the town, had been greatly annoyed at the shouting, screaming, and laughing of his fellow prisoners, who were, however, now much more quiet and comparatively well-behaved.
They were all subjected to a new and to Peace a most painful operation.
He was well aware that it would be next to useless, if not quite hypocritical, for one in his position to lay claim to any considerable delicacy of feeling, or to be over scrupulous in matters of common decency.
But there were occasionally, however, he found, even amongst convicts, those who will bear a pretty long period of imprisonment, during which they are subjected to a variety of contaminating influences, and yet not have their susceptibilities completely destroyed. Of these he was one, and he felt that the treatment he had to undergo was conceived in a barbarous spirit, and was fitted to destroy utterly any feelings of self-respect which his previous experiences had left in him.