tes that could be called musical.

The result surpassed my expectations. Tolliday, our fiddler,
declared that the notes were true music, though to be sure not very
resonant, and he undertook to tune the strings in fifths, so that
it might be able to take a proper part in our next symphony. Having
no bow with which to scrape the strings, he said that they could
only be strummed with the finger and thumb, and when he offered to
teach one of us thus to handle it, there were many candidates for
the place, which in the end fell to a man named Winslow. The men
were all mightily pleased with the success of our work, and I was
secretly delighted, not with the instrument as a producer of music,
but at knowing that we had a box which might serve those of us who
could not swim as a raft.

We had now at command (if we could secretly purloin it) a rope to
let us down, and a raft to ferry us over the moat, but we had still
to find a means of getting beyond the wall, and to this I bent all
my energy of mind. In this, too, I took Joe Punchard into
consultation, and we discussed all kinds of plans. With the sentry
on guard throughout the night in the courtyard there was no hope of
escape by the gate and drawbridge. There was no opening in the
wall. The only possible means of exit was to cut a hole in it, and
this would be a matter of great toil, the wall being, as some one
had told us, ten feet thick. It consisted, so far as we could tell
from the inside, of solid blocks of stone cemented together, and
when, at an odd moment when no one was looking, I tried to scrape
away some of the cement between two of the stones, I found that it
was almost as hard as the stone itself.

To cut through ten feet of such solid material was a task that
might have caused any one to despair. Still, it was the only course
open to us, and I have never known any task too hard for patience
and determination. Joe and I decided that we must gradually scrape
away the cement around one of the blocks until we could remove this
altogether, and then work at the next one, and the next, until we
had pierced right through to the open air.

Apart from the toilsomeness of the task, there were risks to be
feared and provided against. First; one or another of the soldiers
inspected our dormitory every day. This inspection, 'tis true, had
become somewhat perfunctory, the man being content, as a rule, to
mount the ladder until his head was a foot or two above the level