Excerpt from In Her Majesty's Keeping, Vol. 3 of 3: The Story of a Hidden Life Exciting themselves without a cause. In the old days of the hulks convicts led awful lives, no doubt. Ill - fed, ill-clothed, the feeble sub jected to the tyranny of the strong, the good and bad chained together in groups there is no doubt that it was a Pandemonium. If you could only listen, as I do every weary day, to the complaints men make who ask to see the governor! Either they are trivial or they are saucy. It is not possible to find anything serious to complain of. The warders know this, and, being ignorant men, are frightened when the public make an outcry, for they can't make out what it's all about; so they grow demoralised and fear to do their duty. Their lives are tormented by the convicts within; their minds are disturbed by the mis-state ments which ex-convicts send to the news papers. In the vicinity of Millbank and Pentonville, if they go outside in uniform to enjoy a glass of ale, they are gibed at by street-arabs, who call them slave-drivers.' And why? Simply because all is mystery within. It's like the Bluebeard chamber that I saw once in a pantomime. Awful without, but when the door opened there were 44 - 2. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.