"They are not felons, but two soldiers put in here for a week for disorderly conduct."
"What a shame," I cried, "to degrade them in this manner! What good can it do?"
"Oh," said he, laughing; "it will make them desert to the States the moment they get out."
"And those two little boys; what are they here for?"
"For murder!" whispered he.
I almost sprang from my seat; it appeared too dreadful to be true.
"Yes," he continued. "That child to the right is in for shooting his sister. The other, to the left, for killing a boy of his own age with a hoe, and burying him under the roots of a fallen tree. Both of these boys come from the neighbourhood of Peterboro'. Your district, by the bye, sends fewer convicts to the Penitentiary than any part of the Upper Province."
It was with great pleasure I heard him say this. During a residence of thirteen years at Belleville, there has not been one execution. The county of Hastings is still unstained with the blood of a criminal. There is so little robbery committed in this part of the country, that the thought of thieves or housebreakers never for a moment disturbs our rest. This is not the case in Hamilton and Toronto, where daring acts of housebreaking are of frequent occurrence.
The constant influx of runaway slaves from the States has added greatly to the criminal lists on the frontier. The addition of these people to our population is not much to be coveted. The slave, from his previous habits and education, does not always make a good citizen. During the last assizes at Cobourg, a black man and his wife were condemned to be hung for a most horrible murder, and their son, a young man of twenty years of age, offered the sheriff to hang his own father and mother for a new suit of clothes. Those who laud the black man, and place him above the white, let them produce in the whole annals of human crime a more atrocious one than this! Yet it was not a hanging matter.
I heard a gentleman exclaim with honest indignation, when this anecdote was told in his hearing--"If a man were wanting to hang that monster, I would do it myself."