202 FOREST LIFE AND SPORT IN INDIA 
selves convicts, who are in a position to make his 
daily life a daily torture; and if he escapes such a 
fate, he has still to run the gauntlet of malaria, 
dysentery, tuberculosis, and other minor disorders, 
which, if they fail to kill, will still leave lasting 
sears from their attacks. 
In the star-shaped gaol now constructed the 
prisoners pass a period of probation, and, if their 
tempers endure the strain of silence and mechanical 
exercise, they are rightly considered to be trust- 
worthy in better conditions. They are then drafted 
to public works—to the dockyard, to the saw- 
mills, to lumbering in the forest ; the worst to hard- 
labour in the chain gangs on Viper Island, the most 
amenable to domestic service amongst the resi- 
dents. . 
Another term completed, they become “ self-sup- 
porters,” and are given land for cultivation ; or they 
may earn money by their labour, they may even 
marry a convict wife and bring up a brood with no 
past history, but perhaps with inherited tendencies 
from brains dulled by long loss of liberty, and with 
consciences unable to distinguish between right and 
wrong. Yet the best keep before them ever the 
prospect of return to the little hut in the native 
village, and dream, maybe, of the warm evenings 
when the sun is ripening the wheat, and when the 
mango groves are alive with birds; or of the flat- 
topped roofs in the distant hills, where the water 
murmurs between the fields glowing with Indian 
corn or crimson with the ripening millets. These 
are they who in emergency stand by their masters, 
who will risk their lives to save the shipwrecked, or 
