nion, when he saw the chaplain, in his surplice,
crossing the green to his rooms. Then, at a sudden impulse, Ralph
pushed aside the guard, and, tapping the clergyman on the shoulder,
called on him to stop and listen.

"We are condemned men," he said; "and if the law takes its course, in
six days we are to die; but in less time than that we will be dead
already if they keep us in that hell on earth."

The chaplain stared at Ralph's face with a look compounded equally of
amazement and fear.

"Take him away," he cried nervously to the guard, who had now regained
possession of their prisoner.

"You are a minister of the Gospel," said Ralph.

"Your servant," said the clergyman, with mock humility.

"My servant, indeed!" said Ralph; "my servant before God, yet beware
of hypocrisy. You are a Christian minister, and you read in your Bible
of the man who was cast into a lion's den, and of the three men who
were thrown into the fiery furnace. But what den of lions was ever so
deadly as this, where no fire would burn in the pestilential air?"

"He is mad," cried the chaplain, sidling off; "look at his eyes." The
guard were making futile efforts to hurry Ralph away, but he shouted
again, in a voice that echoed through the court,--

"You are a Christian minister, and your Master sent his disciples over
all the earth without purse or scrip, but you lie here in luxury,
while we die there in disease. Look to it, man, look to it! A
reckoning day is at hand as sure as the same God is over us all!"

"The man is mad and murderous!" cried the affrighted chaplain. "Take
him away."

Not waiting for his order to be executed, the spick-and-span wearer of
the unsoiled surplice disappeared into one of the side rooms of the
court.

This extraordinary scene might have resulted in a yet more rigorous
treatment of the prisoners, but it produced the opposite effect.
Within the same hour Ralph and Sim were removed from Doomsdale and
imprisoned in a room high up in the Donjon tower.

Their new abode was in every way more tolerable than the old one. It
had no fire, and it enjoyed the questionable benefit of being
constantly filled with nearly all the smoke of every fire beneath it.
The dense clouds escaped in part through a hole in the wall where a
stone had been disturbed. This aperture also served the less desirable
purpose of admitting the rain and the wind.

Here the days were passed. They were few and short. Doomsdale itself
could n