tly, and the rest you must manage for yourself. You
will probably find a carriage somewhere in the neighborhood, and friends
looking out for you. But I know nothing about that.--I need not remind
you that there is a man-at-arms to the right of the tower. You will take
care, of course, to choose a dark night, and wait till the sentinel is
asleep. You must take your chance of being shot; but--'

"'All right! All right! At least I shall not rot here,' cried the young
man.

"'Well, that may happen nevertheless,' replied the jailer, with a stupid
expression.

"Beauvoir thought this was merely one of the aimless remarks that such
folks indulge in. The hope of freedom filled him with such joy that he
could not be troubled to consider the words of a man who was no more
than a better sort of peasant. He set to work at once, and had filed
the bars through in the course of the day. Fearing a visit from the
Governor, he stopped up the breaches with bread crumb rubbed in rust
to make it look like iron; he hid his rope, and waited for a favorable
night with the intensity of anticipation, the deep anguish of soul that
makes a prisoner's life dramatic.

"At last, one murky night, an autumn night, he finished cutting through
the bars, tied the cord firmly to the stump, and perched himself on the
sill outside, holding on by one hand to the piece of iron remaining.
Then he waited for the darkest hour of the night, when the sentinels
would probably be asleep; this would be not long before dawn. He knew
the hours of their rounds, the length of each watch, every detail with
which prisoners, almost involuntarily, become familiar. He waited till
the moment when one of the men-at-arms had spent two-thirds of his watch
and gone into his box for shelter from the fog. Then, feeling sure that
the chances were at the best for his escape, he let himself down knot by
knot, hanging between earth and sky, and clinging to his rope with the
strength of a giant. All was well. At the last knot but one, just as he
was about to let himself drop, a prudent impulse led him to feel for
the ground with his feet, and he found no footing. The predicament
was awkward for a man bathed in sweat, tired, and perplexed, and in a
position where his life was at stake on even chances. He was about to
risk it, when a trivial incident stopped him; his hat fell off; happily,
he listened for the noise it must make in striking the ground, and he
heard not a sound.

"The pr