debt. The third time his sentence was twenty-
five days, so that for a ten-pound debt, which,
after all, he had done his best to pay, Stevens
suffered in one half year seventy-five days in
prison, with the prospect of his wife and
family starving had it not been for the help
of his master. At last the poor fellow, in utter
despair, sought refuge in the workhouse, to
which his family had preceded him, for little
by little every stick of furniture and nearly
ail their clothes had been sold or pawned. His
master told me that he had been to see him in
the workhouse, but that he was beyond doing
any work, for he said that it would only be
putting himself in the way of imprisonment again.
With a sick wife it was well-nigh useless to
attempt to emigrate, or even to go to another
part of the country. And so you see there is
one law for the rich bankrupt and another
for the poor. If Stevens, instead of owing ten
pounds, had been a financial agent, or a
railway contractor—or even a builder—and
if he had been some hundreds of thousands
to the bad, he would have been a free man in a
few weeks or months after he filed his petition.
In the year of grace 1868, it seems not to be a
crime to owe money, provided you owe enough.
Our county court laws are certainly not a credit
to us. As the master of a London workhouse
once said to me, they provide plenty of helpless
paupers for the ratepayers to lodge, clothe, and
feed. I don't think that any one who reads
how I got through the court, and how poor
Stevens was punished for owing the trifle he
did, will deny that in England there are very
different laws for rich and poor bankrupts. *

* Both the stories related in. this paper are—
with changed names and other circumstances—
strictly true. The writer has known labouring men
and journeymen artisans, to be imprisoned under
orders of county courts four and five times for the same
debt, and after all had been gone through, the debts
were not purged. In the present state of the law,
if a creditor is vindictive, he may imprison his
debtor again and again; and the county court must
give him power to do so, it has no option.

                   EYE-MEMORY.

AMONG the public questions which are from
time to time brought before us—in connexion,
sometimes, with deeds of violence and bloodshed,
sometimes with law proceedings of a less
alarming nature, and affecting property rather
than life—those in which disputed identity plays
a part are not the least interesting and curious.
There is generally much that is calculated to
astonish us in cases of this sort. At one time
we are amazed at the unhesitating manner
in which a witness will speak to the identity
of some one of whom he has just had a glimpse,
and that under circumstances the least favourable
in the world for observing even the chief
features of a stranger's appearance; while, at
another time, we are equally surprised to find
some individual hesitating to identify a person
with whom he has been in company for half an
hour at a time, and whose countenance he lias
had special opportunities of studying.

A curious instance of this last phase of what
may be called optical uncertainty was
developed in the course of those fruitless
investigations into the circumstances of the
Bloomsbury murder, during the progress of which so
many strange things came to light. The
hairdresser, as may perhaps be remembered, who
had fitted a false beard on to the face of the
suspected man absolutely professed himself to be
unable to identity that face when called upon
to do so. Now, any hesitation upon such a
point as this is, under such circumstances, a
thing one can scarcely comprehend. It seems
as if it could be hardly possible to perform
such an office as this—of fastening on a false
beard for a man without having every
feature and characteristic of his face impressed
upon one's memory, sufficiently, at any rate,
to render his recognition, within any reasonable
time, a thing of certainty. Yet here is
the evidence of this barber tending distinctly
in a contrary direction. But the difficulties
connected with the identification of one human
being by other human beings were exemplified
throughout that Bloomsbury inquiry. The
suspected man was tall; he was not tall; he
was of middle stature; he was fair; he had
light whiskers; he had a long beard. He
appeared, at last, to have none of these characteristics,
to be non-existent altogether, mythical.
There was but one consistent witness who
appeared throughout the case, and who could, and
did, swear to him straight on without any hesitation
or misgiving; but then it turned out,
unfortunately, that the things sworn to by this otherwise
most satisfactory witness were a series of
the most shameless lies that were ever uttered
by the human tongue.

In that Titchbourne cause, again, which is
still before the public, what strong evidence is
afforded of this uncertainty which attends the
process of personal identification. Would any
one believe that the relations and intimate
friends of any young man—people who had had
opportunities of getting well acquainted with
his person, his ways, the "trick of his visage,"
his manner of speech, his very habit of thought
—should not have been able, when he came
back after what was certainly a long absence,
but still a man in his prime—to say " This
is he," or "This is not he," with absolute
certainty? It is wonderful, but it is so.
Indeed, these cases of disputed identity are so
numerous and so perplexing, and involve often
such important issues, that one is tempted at
times to wish that each individual could be
labelled or tattooed with his or her name at the
moment of birth, or in some other way stamped
with a badge, so as to set all doubts on that
subject at rest for ever.

But by far the most remarkable of recent
instances, bearing upon this particular subject,
is the case of the man lately found dead in the
empty house at Hackney Wick. That a man's