FORESTERS' LIFE IN THE ANDAMANS 201 
sky, produces a characteristic scenery that remains 
in the memory. But as soon as foot is set on this 
promising shore illusion vanishes, for the trail of the 
convict is over all; 13,000 in number, there are 
perhaps two free men to every hundred criminals, 
and the minority is guarded by armed police wher- 
ever it moves. As you walk along the roads lined 
with luxuriant tropical vegetation, you meet a gang 
of numbered slaves clad in coarse canvas, with light 
shackles tied to the waist; they halt, and deposit the 
implements of labour—axes, spades, and crowbars— 
at their feet, and wait with crossed hands till you pass. 
You enter a boat: the convict crew must be overawed 
by an armed officer, lest they murder the passengers 
and escape to freedom or death across the open sea. 
You sit at meals: your food has been cooked by one 
convict, and another stands to serve you. In short, 
you are never free from detected crime, and, in spite 
of the arrangements made to protect the lives of 
officials of the State in public, you know that in 
private you are at the mercy of any individual 
whose mental balance is upset by loss of liberty, or 
who finds his life intolerable, and desires to lose it 
by those quick legal methods commencing with a 
summary inquiry and ending even more abruptly 
with six feet of rope. 
And if these are the sensations that the free man, 
still sensitive to his novel surroundings, may feel, 
what are those that the prisoner himself experiences? 
He has the advantage that his term of confinement 
in gaol is but short, and that the distraction of work, 
severe though it be, is soon afforded. But he remains 
even then at the mercy of the gang overseers, them- 
