r with laughter. The jailer, however, was a man accustomed to deal
with emergencies. "You need not laugh," he said, "every thing shall
go on as before, and I shall take no notice of the absence of your
companions. You are now numbered One to Seventeen inclusive, and you
stand charged with highway robbery, forgery, treason, smuggling,
barn-burning, bribery, poaching, usury, piracy, witchcraft, assault
and battery, using false weights and measures, burglary,
counterfeiting, robbing hen-roosts, conspiracy, and poisoning your
grandmother by proxy. I intended to-day to dress the convicts in
prison garb, and you shall immediately be so clothed."

"I shall require seventeen suits," said the Jolly-cum-pop.

"Yes," said the jailer, "they shall be furnished."

"And seventeen rations a day," said the Jolly-cum-pop.

"Certainly," replied the jailer.

"This is luxury," roared the Jolly-cum-pop. "I shall spend my whole
time in eating and putting on clean clothes."

Seventeen large prison suits were now brought to the Jolly-cum-pop.
He put one on, and hung up the rest in his cell. These suits were
half bright yellow and half bright green, with spots of bright red,
as big as saucers.

The jailer now had doors cut from one cell to another. "If the
Potentate comes here and wants to look at the prisoners," he said to
the Jolly-cum-pop, "you must appear in cell number One, so that he
can look through the hole in the door, and see you; then, as he walks
along the corridor, you must walk through the cells, and whenever he
looks into a cell, you must be there."

"He will think," merrily replied the Jolly-cum-pop, "that all your
prisoners are very fat, and that the little girls have grown up into
big men."

"I will endeavor to explain that," said the jailer.

For several days the Jolly-cum-pop was highly amused at the idea of
his being seventeen criminals, and he would sit first in one cell and
then in another, trying to look like a ferocious pirate, a
hard-hearted usurer, or a mean-spirited chicken thief, and laughing
heartily at his failures. But, after a time, he began to tire of
this, and to have a strong desire to see what sort of a tunnel the
Prince's miners and rock-splitters were making under his house. "I
had hoped," he said to himself, "that I should pine away in
confinement, and so be able to get through the window-bars; but with
nothing to do, and seventeen rations a day, I see no chance of that.
But I must get out of