An unnecessary warning. Had they dared they would have disobeyed. But that is impossible in the Turkish army. Very gingerly, very slowly, their trembling hands bore the box outside and deposited it tenderly on the ground. The sweat was dripping from their livid faces when the job was over, and they hurried to a safe distance.

The woman was hauled roughly to the church, which had been made the headquarters of the mir alai (general) and his staff. The mir alai, a corpulent, white-bearded man with an amiable countenance, was seated in the priest's chair writing despatches, while some of his officers were idly breaking down the sacred candles or teasing out the eyes of the saints in the holy pictures with the points of their swords. On the sudden entry of two soldiers dragging forward a captive, the mir alai looked up, annoyed.

"What has this Bulgar woman done?" he asked.

Her guards relinquished their hold for an instant to salute the commander. But it was the usbashi who answered the question.

"She was discovered with an empty bombshell in her hand, kneeling beside a nailed-up wooden case. When we sought to examine it she dared us, and struck Mehemet, here, in the face. She has just declared that whoever opens the box will die."

"Well, is all this true?" asked the mir alai, looking benignly at the prison

"there are ways of making stubborn women speak."

She trembled violently. Her forehead was wrinkled in unwonted thought. With the mind of an illtrained child, this woman was deciding a problem of life and death.

"Yes," she replied, "it is explosive." "And it will burst if the lid is opened?"

She nodded her head.

"Perhaps you prepared it for us?" For the first time the woman raised her head and looked the judge in the eyes.

"I did," she answered firmly.

The mir alai looked benignantly at the prisoner for the space of a few seconds.

"Take the woman away," he said to the soldiers; adding, as the usbashi saluted and prepared to leave also, "Tell Onbashi Abdullah to take a firingparty and have this woman shot."

The prisoner gave a piteous cry as she heard the sentence, and the guards dragged her senseless body from the church.

The mir alai settled himself again in the chair and resumed his writing. So absorbed did he become in his work that he never noticed the departure of his staff, who wished to see the shooting; and the volley of the shootingparty caused him to start violently, fancying that the insurgents had made an attack. When, after a moment's brain-racking, the recollection of his sentence came back to him, he sat dreamily looking before him, pondering deeply. His musings were interrupted by the entrance of the usbashi.

"What does your Excellency wish done with that case of explosives?" he asked.

"That," observed his superior officer, "is exactly what I have been wondering; and I have just formed a plan." The usbashi waited attentively for its enunciation.

I was staying at the very comfortable Hotel Imperial at Tokio two years ago, and one evening overheard in the smoking-room there an animated conversation between an American and an English tourist, who, much as they differed from one another in their estimate of the charms of Japan, were unanimous in their admiration of the progress made by that country in the last twenty years. Praise was lavished without stint on its wonderful modern civilization, until the strain of panegyric was abruptly terminated by a passing reference to prisons, whereupon the American traveller said dogmatically

"Prisons-they are all as vile as those in China and Morocco. I visited them when I was here some years ago, and I am told they are not one whit improved: the Japanese are as callous in their treatment of prisoners as were their ancestors under the Shoguns. A Japanese prison is as bad as or worse than was a prison in England under your Elizabeth-in the days of dungeons, 'little ease' racks and 'the Scavenger's Daughter.'"

The younger traveller assented, and the subject dropped. My curiosity was greatly aroused, and an opportunity having been given me a few days later to verify what I had heard, I determined to go and see for myself. There is no difficulty in obtaining an admission to view the principal prison of Tokio-the Wormwood Scrubbs of the capital of Japan-if one happens to be either a barrister, or an officer of the army or navy of England, and of other countries for all I know.

To reach the prison I drove in a rickshaw about two and a half miles out of the town in the direction of Shinjika -passing as we went along by villas

and gardens of the richer Japanese, and thence emerging into the country, along narrow lanes bordered by high banks just like those of Devonshire.

The prison stands isolated on a fine plateau overlooking the town, and is approached from the road by a long avenue of chestnuts and maples leading to a lodge built, in the Gothic style, of red brick. There is nothing forbidding in the general aspect from outside -a low wall, pierced by two lodgesbeyond which at some distance in the enclosure stands a group of buildings that form the prison itself. These cover a large space of ground, and are surrounded by a well-kept park, and neat and orderly kitchen-gardens stretching from the outer walls to the prison itself.

On ringing at the bell of the lodge, the door was opened by a warder in neat uniform, to whom I gave my card. He ushered me into a small porter's room on the left, furnished in the European style. The walls, however, were not hung with manacles and handcuffs, as in an English prison. Leaving me there, he presently returned with two Japanese in uniform, one of whom proved to be an interpreter, and the other the Governor of the prison-the latter a young, smart, and, for a Japanese, very good-looking

man.

He was extremely cordial, offered me cigarettes and tea, and asked many questions about England and English ways, and if I had seen any English prisons. I told him I had visited Portland and Strangeways gaol, and he was eager to hear all I could tell him of the system carried on in these establishments. After talking for half an hour, by means of the interpreter, he rang a bell, and asked to

see the Deputy-Governor, to whom he gave directions to show me round, with the injunction that I was to see everything I wished, and with the request that before leaving I would write, in a book kept for the purpose in the lodge, my impressions, with any suggestions that might occur to me.

The Deputy-Governor, an elderly man with charming manners and able to talk English, then took me through a gate that led into the park and gardens already mentioned, in which a number of prisoners were at work, sweeping and weeding. Thence we got a full view of the prison itself, a large and fine building of red brick, the centre crowned by a high clock tower, from which the other buildings radiate like a starfish. Entering the prison through three heavily-barred gates we found ourselves in a fine hall the walls of which, covered with white tiles, looked clean and cool. The spotless floor was of red brick, and from this spring skeleton galleries of iron on which the cells open. This English system of division was adopted, my guide told me, in preference to others when the place was built twelve years ago.

He was much amused by my telling him of the conversation I had heard at the Imperial Hotel, but confessed that within his own memory (he was a man of about fifty) the Japanese penal system had been of the most barbarous description; mutilation was inflicted for slight misdemeanors, as is now the case at Canton, and prisoners are left untried to starve, forgotten in fetid dens, as I have myself seen them recently at Tangiers and Tetuan in Morocco.

All this, as I presently saw for myself, is now changed. Capable experts have been sent to America, to England, and to Germany to study the various prison systems in those countries, and the result is an eclectic blend of the three.

Opening the door of one of the cells, the Deputy-Governor showed me a small room as clean as and more comfortable than the cell of an English prisoner. Here there is more light allowed, both natural and artificial, as well as more air, as the window is bigger than that in an English gaol. The gas jet, too, is better placed for reading, and the ceiling a good deal more lofty. Of course there is here no plank bed, only a rug and mat for each person, supplemented by the odd shaped wooden pillow-in shape much like a flat-iron-so beloved by the Japanese. Here, too, there is no solitary confinement save as a punishment; each cell contains two, three, or four prisoners as a rule, who do not work in the cells but in the workshops. The four occupants of the cell I visited were to be seen later in the carpenter's shop.

From this cell I was taken to the chapel of the prison, a small Buddhist temple, adorned with a large figure of Amida, joss-sticks, gongs and bronze storks-movable, all these to be replaced by another shrine when required for Shinto worship, as is the Catholic altar when the chapel of an English gaol is in use by the Protestants. Here were a number of juvenile prisonersbright-looking boys-with oddly shaved heads like that of a Japanese doll. These were dressed in kimonos-loose dressing gowns-blue or deep maroon in color, and wadded like an eider down quilt. They sat in a row before the altar while a picturesque old priest in blue and yellow instructed them in the mysteries of their religion.

Hence we passed to a number of large, airy workshops, traversing en route the prison yard, here no hideous expanse of sand bounded by dreary walls, but a stretch of yellow gravel bordered by long beds of flowering beans and clumps of shrubs. The workshops hummed like hives as we