moking and flaring. I could see nothing
else but black darkness. Our lights warmed the air about us with their
pitchy blaze, and the two prisoners seemed rather to like that, as they
limped along in the midst of the muskets. We could not go fast, because
of their lameness; and they were so spent, that two or three times we
had to halt while they rested.

After an hour or so of this travelling, we came to a rough wooden hut
and a landing-place. There was a guard in the hut, and they challenged,
and the sergeant answered. Then, we went into the hut, where there was
a smell of tobacco and whitewash, and a bright fire, and a lamp, and
a stand of muskets, and a drum, and a low wooden bedstead, like an
overgrown mangle without the machinery, capable of holding about a dozen
soldiers all at once. Three or four soldiers who lay upon it in their
great-coats were not much interested in us, but just lifted their heads
and took a sleepy stare, and then lay down again. The sergeant made some
kind of report, and some entry in a book, and then the convict whom I
call the other convict was drafted off with his guard, to go on board
first.

My convict never looked at me, except that once. While we stood in the
hut, he stood before the fire looking thoughtfully at it, or putting up
his feet by turns upon the hob, and looking thoughtfully at them as if
he pitied them for their recent adventures. Suddenly, he turned to the
sergeant, and remarked,--

"I wish to say something respecting this escape. It may prevent some
persons laying under suspicion alonger me."

"You can say what you like," returned the sergeant, standing coolly
looking at him with his arms folded, "but you have no call to say it
here. You'll have opportunity enough to say about it, and hear about it,
before it's done with, you know."

"I know, but this is another pint, a separate matter. A man can't
starve; at least I can't. I took some wittles, up at the willage over
yonder,--where the church stands a'most out on the marshes."

"You mean stole," said the sergeant.

"And I'll tell you where from. From the blacksmith's."

"Halloa!" said the sergeant, staring at Joe.

"Halloa, Pip!" said Joe, staring at me.

"It was some broken wittles--that's what it was--and a dram of liquor,
and a pie."

"Have you happened to miss such an article as a pie, blacksmith?" asked
the sergeant, confidentially.

"My wife did, at the very moment when you came in. Don't you know, Pi