les
beneath the building.

Then, as he stood, still marvelling at what he had seen, there suddenly
came a loud and startling crash, as of a trap-door let fall into its
place. A faint circle of light shone within the darkness of the
building, as though from a lantern carried in a man's hands. There was
a sound of jingling, as of keys, of approaching footsteps, and of
voices talking together, and presently there came out into the
vestibule the dark figures of two men, one of them carrying a ship's
lantern. One of these figures closed and locked the door behind him,
and then both were about to turn away without having observed Dunburne,
when, of a sudden, a circle from the roof of the lantern lit up his
pale and melancholy face, and he instantly became aware that his
presence had been discovered.

The next moment the lantern was flung up almost into his eyes, and in
the light he saw the sharp, round rim of a pistol-barrel directed
immediately against his forehead.

In that moment our young gentleman's life hung as a hair in the
balance. In the intense instant of expectancy his brain appeared to
expand as a bubble, and his ears tingled and hummed as though a cloud
of flies were buzzing therein. Then suddenly a voice smote like a blow
upon the silence--"Who are you, and what d'ye want?"

"Indeed," said Dunburne, "I do not know."

"What do you do here?"

"Nor do I know that, either."

He who held the lantern lifted it so that the illumination fell still
more fully upon Dunburne's face and person. Then his interlocutor
demanded, "How did you come here?"

Upon the moment Dunburne determined to answer so much of the truth as
the question required. "'Twas by no fault of my own," he cried. "I was
knocked on the head and kidnapped in England, with the design of being
sold in Baltimore. The vessel that fetched me put into the harbor over
yonder to wait for good weather, and I jumped overboard and swam
ashore, to stumble into the cursed pickle in which I now find myself."

"Have you, then, an education? To be sure, you talk so."

"Indeed I have," said Dunburne--"a decent enough education to fit me
for a gentleman, if the opportunity offered. But what of that?" he
exclaimed, desperately. "I might as well have no more learning than a
beggar under the bush, for all the good it does me." The other once
more flashed the light of his lantern over our young gentleman's
miserable and barefoot figure. "I had a mind," says he, "to