and began operations.

Within a few days the Confederates decided upon certain changes in the
prison for the greater security of their captives. A week afterward the
cook-room was abandoned, the stairway nailed up, the prisoners sent to
the upper floors, and all communication with the east cellar was cut
off. This was a sore misfortune, for this apartment was the only
possible base of successful tunnel operations. Colonel Rose now began to
study other practicable means of escape, and spent night after night
examining the posts and watching the movements of the sentinels on the
four sides of Libby. One very dark night, during a howling storm, Rose
again, unexpectedly met Hamilton in a place where no prisoner could
reasonably be looked for at such an hour. For an instant the
impenetrable darkness made it impossible for either to determine whether
he had met a friend or foe: neither had a weapon, yet each involuntarily
felt for one, and each made ready to spring at the other's throat, when
a flash of lightning revealed their identity. The two men had availed
themselves of the darkness of the night and the roar of the storm to
attempt an escape from a window of the upper west room to a platform
that ran along the west outer wall of the prison, from which they hoped
to reach the ground and elude the sentinels, whom they conjectured would
be crouched in the shelter of some doorway or other partial refuge that
might be available; but so vivid and frequent were the lightning flashes
that the attempt was seen to be extremely hazardous.

Rose now spoke of the entrance from the south-side street to the middle
cellar, having frequently noticed the entrance and exit of workmen at
that point, and expressed his belief that if an entrance could be
effected to this cellar it would afford them the only chance of slipping
past the sentinels.

He hunted up a bit of pine-wood which he whittled into a sort of wedge,
and the two men went down into the dark, vacant kitchen directly over
this cellar. With the wedge Rose pried a floor-board out of its place,
and made an opening large enough to let himself through. He had never
been in this middle cellar, and was wholly ignorant of its contents or
whether it was occupied by Confederates or workmen; but as he had made
no noise, and the place was in profound darkness, he decided to go down
and reconnoiter.

He wrenched off one of the long boards that formed a table-seat in the
kitchen, and foun