ted to him
a plan of escape that had occurred to his sagacious brain. In the yard
appropriated to the amusements of the gentlemen "misdemeaning," there
was a water-pipe that, skirting the wall, passed over the door through
which every morning the pious captives passed in their way to the
chapel. By this Tomlinson proposed to escape; for to the pipe which
reached from the door to the wall, in a slanting and easy direction,
there was a sort of skirting-board; and a dexterous and nimble man might
readily, by the help of this board, convey himself along the pipe, until
the progress of that useful conductor (which was happily very brief) was
stopped by the summit of the wall, where it found a sequel in another
pipe, that descended to the ground on the opposite side of the wall.
Now, on this opposite side was the garden of the prison; in this garden
was a watchman, and this watchman was the hobgoblin of Tomlinson's
scheme,--"For suppose us safe in the garden," said he, "what shall we do
with this confounded fellow?"

"But that is not all," added Paul; "for even were there no watchman,
there is a terrible wall, which I noted especially last week, when
we were set to work in the garden, and which has no pipe, save a
perpendicular one, that a man must have the legs of a fly to be able to
climb!"

"Nonsense!" returned Tomlinson; "I will show you how to climb the
stubbornest wall in Christendom, if one has but the coast clear. It is
the watchman, the watchman, we must--"

"What?" asked Paul, observing his comrade did not conclude the sentence.

It was some time before the sage Augustus replied; he then said in a
musing tone,--

"I have been thinking, Paul, whether it would be consistent with virtue,
and that strict code of morals by which all my actions are regulated,
to--slay the watchman!"

"Good heavens!" cried Paul, horror-stricken.

"And I have decided," continued Augustus, solemnly, without regard to
the exclamation, "that the action would be perfectly justifiable!"

"Villain!" exclaimed Paul, recoiling to the other end of the stone
box--for it was night--in which they were cooped.

"But," pursued Augustus, who seemed soliloquizing, and whose voice,
sounding calm and thoughtful, like Young's in the famous monologue in
"Hamlet," denoted that he heeded not the uncourteous interruption,--"but
opinion does not always influence conduct; and although it may be
virtuous to murder the watchman, I have not the heart to do