risoner, Thomas Edwards. A collapsing beam had torn away
some bricks from the wall of his cell, and he came wriggling through
the aperture, using the most dreadful oaths.

"Stir yourselves--Oh,--,--, stir yourselves! Standin' there like
a--lot of stuck pigs! Get out the Admiral! The Admiral, I tell you!
. . . . Hark to the poor old devil, damnin' away down ther, wi' two
hundredweight o' table pressin' against his belly!"

Mr. Edwards, in fact, used an even more vulgar word. But he was not
stopping to weigh words. Magistrates, Inspector, Clerk--he took
charge of them all on the spot--a master of men. The Admiral, in the
unfathomed dark of the cellar, was indeed uttering language to make
your hair creep.

"Oh, cuss away, y' old varmint!" sang down Mr. Edwards cheerfully.
"The louder you cuss, the better the hearin'; 'means ye have air to
breathe an' nothin' broke internal. . . . Eh? Oh, _I_ knows th' old
warrior! Opened a gate for en once when he was out hare-huntin', up
St. Germans way--I likes a bit o' sport, I do, when I happens on it.
Lord love ye, the way he damned my eyes for bein' slow about it!
. . . Aye, aye, Admiral! Cuss away, cuss away--proper quarter-deck
you're givin' us! But we're gettin' to you fast as we can. . . .
England can't spare the likes o' you--an' she won't, not if we can
help it!"

The man worked like a demon. What is more, he was making the others
work, flailing them all--peer and baronet and parson--with
slave-driver's oaths, while they tugged to loosen the timbers under
which the magistrates' table lay wedged.

"Lift, I tell ye! Lift! . . . What the--'s wrong with that end o'
the beam? Stuck, is it? Jammed? Jammed your grandmothers!
Nobbut a few pounds o' loose lime an' plaster beddin' it. Get down
on your knees an' clear it. . . . That's better! And now pull!
PULL, I say! Oh, not _that_ way, you rabbits!--here, let me show
you!"

By efforts Herculean, first digging the rubbish clear with clawed
hands, then straining and heaving till their loins had almost
cracked, they levered up the table at length, and released not only
the Admiral, but the two remaining magistrates, whom they found
pinned under its weight, one unharmed, but in a swoon, the other
moaning feebly with the pain of two broken ribs.

"Whew! What the devil of a smell of brandy!" observed Lord Rattley,
mopping his brow in the intervals of helping to hoist the rescued
ones up the moraine. At the top