ch for him; he
turned up the whites of his eyes, so that persons who were unacquainted
with his views upon religious subjects might have supposed him to be
engaged in some devotional exercise.

"Next door to this fellow--though it seemed a long way off, for the cell
was in an angle of the prison--there was one of the right sort; name of
Jeffreys. No prison in England could have held _him_ if he had had a
file. With a rusty nail as he had picked up he dug through his cell
wall, and came out one night, all of a sudden, upon the Smasher--thought
he was out of doors, poor beggar, through this cursed angle, you see,
and after all had only changed his room."

"That must have been the devil," observed Richard.

"It _was_," said Mr. Rolfe, significantly.

"'Why, how on earth did you do it?' asked the Smasher. At least I
suppose he did, for the conversation was not reported, as you shall
hear. 'With a mere nail, too. Why, _I_'ve got a file, and yet I never
thought of that.'

"'A file!' cried Jeffreys. 'Let's look. Give it to me.'

"But Molony wouldn't give it him. The case was this, you see. If
Jeffreys could have filed his irons off, and then the window-bars, he
could have made a push for it; but he couldn't wait for the other; the
night was too far gone for that--there was only time for one to free
himself and get away. The Smasher was willing enough to make an effort
now; the other's pluck had put a good heart into him. But since he had
been there so long, and never moved a hand to help hisself, Jeffreys
thought he might stop a little longer; it seemed to him
dog-in-the-manger like to be refused the file--at least that's my view
of what he thought; though he's been blamed a good deal for what
afterward happened."

"But what did happen?"

"Well, they got to high words; the t'other wouldn't give up the file;
and when Jeffreys tried to get hold of it, what did the aggravation
Smasher do--for you see he was used to bolting half-crowns and such
like--but _swallow the file_!"

"Why, that must have killed him?" observed Yorke.

"So Jeffreys concluded," returned Mr. Rolfe, coolly; "and indeed that
was his defense when his trial came on. He pleaded that Molony was dead
already. 'I did not put the file down his throat, though I did deprive
him of it afterward. I was obliged to do it.' He made an anatomy of him
with the nail, in fact, just as the surgeons do with their
dissecting-knives, though not so neat, in order to get