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 hands, ready for use in an instant, still it is only in the immediate vicinity of the great prison that such a sight is ever witnessed, and it must be remembered that in that comparatively small body of men are collected all those convicts who cannot be trusted to obey the very mild rule by which the remaining five or six thousand men of the criminal class who are scattered over the country are governed. At Perth, and in the most solitary country districts also, if you happen to meet a "road party" of convicts, returning from their labour upon the highways under charge of their warder, you see no chains or fetters of any description, secret or open, neither is the warder armed with any visible weapon, not even a sword in its sheath; he may possibly have a revolver in his pocket, as he is, I believe, allowed to carry one if he thinks fit; but the chances are twenty to one that he has left it at home in his own hut, if it be a bush road party, or perhaps has even given it to the constable of the party, himself a convict, to clean.

During the whole time of our sojourn in the colony we never heard of any instance of an attack upon their warder made by one of those parties of convicts, some fifteen to twenty in number, who are sent out into the interior to construct the roads, and are thence called road parties. The danger lies the other way; the temptation to make friends of some of the more decent of the men under his charge is so great, in the solitude of the bush, that an unmarried warder requires much strength of mind to resist it. With a married man the case is different; he has his own family around him in his hut, and does not feel so solitary as the single man,