The author spent twenty years as a "police court missionary" (the forerunner of the modern probation officer) for the London courts. He tells us that he sat down and "cried like a child" at the end of his first day, but eventually he came to realise that "a field for the study of human nature is opened up, and nowhere in the wide world is there a field equal to it". A sympathetic man with a self-deprecating sense of humour. NOTE: A "ticket-of-leave" was a form of parole document given to a prisoner to allow him or her limited freedom outside the prison. - Summary by Peter Yearsley
