ed to meditate, yet he was more than half asleep. But his
sleep was a nightmare, which might be guessed by the incoherent manner
in which he sometimes snored and sometimes snorted.

"Look," said D'Artagnan, "day is declining. It must be nearly four
o'clock. We have been in this place nearly eighty-three hours."

"Hem!" muttered Porthos, with a kind of pretense of answering.

"Did you hear, eternal sleeper?" cried D'Artagnan, irritated that any
one could doze during the day, when he had the greatest difficulty in
sleeping during the night.

"What?" said Porthos.

"I say we have been here eighty-three hours."

"'Tis your fault," answered Porthos.

"How, my fault?"

"Yes, I offered you escape."

"By pulling out a bar and pushing down a door?"

"Certainly."

"Porthos, men like us can't go out from here purely and simply."

"Faith!" said Porthos, "as for me, I could go out with that purity and
that simplicity which it seems to me you despise too much."

D'Artagnan shrugged his shoulders.

"And besides," he said, "going out of this chamber isn't all."

"Dear friend," said Porthos, "you appear to be in a somewhat better
humor to-day than you were yesterday. Explain to me why going out of
this chamber isn't everything."

"Because, having neither arms nor password, we shouldn't take fifty
steps in the court without knocking against a sentinel."

"Very well," said Porthos, "we will kill the sentinel and we shall have
his arms."

"Yes, but before we can kill him--and he will be hard to kill, that
Swiss--he will shriek out and the whole picket will come, and we shall
be taken like foxes, we, who are lions, and thrown into some dungeon,
where we shall not even have the consolation of seeing this frightful
gray sky of Rueil, which no more resembles the sky of Tarbes than the
moon is like the sun. Lack-a-day! if we only had some one to instruct
us about the physical and moral topography of this castle. Ah! when one
thinks that for twenty years, during which time I did not know what to
do with myself, it never occurred to me to come to study Rueil."

"What difference does that make?" said Porthos. "We shall go out all the
same."

"Do you know, my dear fellow, why master pastrycooks never work with
their hands?"

"No," said Porthos, "but I should be glad to be informed."

"It is because in the presence of their pupils they fear that some of
their tarts or creams may turn out badly cooked."

"What then?"