would join hands with us, and impressed on them the necessity
of maintaining silence about it, they one and all promised that
never a word should pass their lips.

As to the scheme itself, when I unfolded its details, they were
somewhat dubious, and, strangely enough, the most enthusiastic in
its favor was little Runnles, the melancholy flute player, and the
most doubtful was the bosun, whose physical courage was equal to
anything, but who was daunted by what appealed more particularly to
the moral qualities of patience and endurance. He dwelt
lugubriously on the difficulties I have already mentioned, and
shook his head when I combated his objections; but he agreed to
throw in his lot with the rest of us, and said that if we once got
clear of the walls, and there was any fighting to do, he would
break any Frenchman's head as soon as look at him.

Nothing remained now but to begin operations, and I soon found that
the demands upon our patience would be even more exacting than I
had supposed. We divided our company of ten into five watches, each
to take a spell of two hours' work. One night, as soon as all was
quiet, Joe and I set to work, he with a chisel which he had used in
making our new instrument, I with my clasp knife. Very gently, so
as to avoid noise, we began to scrape away at the mortar between
the block of stone we had selected for removal and the one below
it.

Runnles hit upon a capital way of warning us of the approach of the
sentry within earshot. He tied a string to Joe's leg, and gave it a
tug when he heard the tramp of footsteps above. Then we desisted
for a minute or two, resuming our work when the footsteps had died
away.

At the end of our two hours' spell we were disappointed at the
little we had been able to do. Two small heaps of dust lay at the
foot of the wall, but the impression on the hard mortar or cement
had been but slight, and I was appalled to think of the weeks that
must elapse before we had cut completely round the stone. But I
professed myself well satisfied with the start we had made, and we
handed over our tools to Dilly and Tolliday, the next couple, with
encouraging words.

Chapter 16: Across The Moat.

It would be tedious to chronicle the stages of our progress, the
hopes and fears, the anxieties and suspense, which in turn laid
hold of me. Night by night for a week, in pitch darkness and bitter
cold, we scraped away the cement, carrying away in the morning in
our