ghing still. "Civis Romanus sum. His
excellency, the mayor, will bear out my statement that I came and saw
and strove to conquer. You do not find it in your competence, sir, to
arrest these gentlemen, who are all subjects of the British crown?"

"It is not my affair," said the mayor.

"And I am not authorized to employ force," said the lieutenant. "We are
nonplussed, Monsieur le Maire."

"It would so appear," said the puzzled functionary; and being bowed from
the room by the lieutenant, he retired.

"Civis Romanus sum," repeated Breschia, when we were left alone. "It is
a great saying. And so you positively won't come back?"

"Positively we will not," said Brunow.

"Then, positively," returned the lieutenant, "I will go back and report
my failure."

"Permit that I condole," said Brunow.

"Permit that I felicitate," answered Breschia; and so with a burlesque
friendly bow on either side they parted.

CHAPTER VII

It was a strange and memorable journey home with the escaped prisoner,
and men have been rarely more embarrassed than Brunow and myself. We
had to deal with the strangest creature, a thing alternately beast and
gentleman, sensitive in every fibre of his nature, and so animalized by
that awful life of imprisonment that he was a constant dread and terror
to himself. To see him slinking in his corner of the railway carriage
or any room at our one or two halting-places, dull, blear-eyed, with
his fingers tapping at his teeth, was pitiable and dreadful, but not so
pitiable and dreadful as to see him grow suddenly conscious of his state
and aspect and awake to some shamefaced effort to arouse himself and
reassert the manhood that had once been in him.

The most astonishing thing in him was the way in which, through all
these silent and horrible years, he had possessed his faculty of
speech. He had been an exceptional linguist in his youth, and he was
an exceptional linguist still. He was most companionable and least
embarrassed with us when he was in the dark, and it was in the dark on
the deck of the steam-packet which carried us to Dover that he gave me
the secret of his retention of this faculty.

He sat with one arm thrown over the vessel's rail and with his face half
averted.

"Do you know, sir," I said, after trying in a dozen ways to draw him
out, and after having failed in all of them--"do you know, sir, that I
am quite sure of one thing about you?"

"What is that?" he asked.

"During