g to do with it?" he said, vehemently; and
the dark eyes were burning with a quick anger under the heavy brows.
Then he spoke more slowly, but with a firm emphasis in his speech. "I
will tell you a little story; it will not detain you, sir. Suppose that
you have a prison so overstocked with political prisoners that you must
keep sixty or seventy in the open yard adjoining the outer wall. You
have little to fear; they are harmless, poor wretches; there are several
old men--two women. Ah! but what are the poor devils to do in those long
nights that are so dark and so cold? However they may huddle together,
they freeze; if they keep not moving, they die; you find them dead in
the morning. If you are a Czar you are glad of that, for your prisons
are choked; it is very convenient. And, then suppose you have a clever
fellow who finds out a narrow passage between the implement-house and
the wall; and he says, 'There, you can work all night at digging a
passage out; and who in the morning will suspect?' Is not that a fine
discovery, when one must keep moving in the dark to prevent one's self
stiffening into a corpse? Oh yes; then you find the poor devils, in
their madness, begin to tear the ground up; what tools have they but
their fingers, when the implement-house is locked? The poor devils!--old
men, too, and women; and how they take their turn at the slow work, hour
after hour, week after week, all through the long, still nights! Inch by
inch it is; and the poor devils become like rabbits, burrowing for a
hole to reach the outer air; and do you know that, after a time, the
first wounds heal, and your fingers become like stumps of iron--"

He held out his two hands; the ends of the fingers were seamed and
corrugated, as if they had been violently scalded. But he could not hold
them steady--they were trembling with the suppressed passion that made
his whole frame tremble.

"Relay after relay, night after night, week after week, month after
month, until those poor devils of rabbits had actually burrowed a
passage out into the freedom of God's world again. And some said the
Czar himself had heard of it, and would not interfere, for the prisons
were choked; and some said the wife of the governor was Polish, and had
a kind heart; but what did it matter when the time was drawing near? And
always this clever fellow--do you know, sir, his name was Verdt
too?--encouraging, helping, goading these poor people on. Then the last
night--h