stayed
there long, his principal business would be to look out the window. I
had soon read all the tracts that were left there, and examined where
former prisoners had broken out, and where a grate had been sawed off,
and heard the history of the various occupants of that room; for I found
that even here there was a history and a gossip which never circulated
beyond the walls of the jail. Probably this is the only house in
the town where verses are composed, which are afterward printed in
a circular form, but not published. I was shown quite a long list of
verses which were composed by some young men who had been detected in an
attempt to escape, who avenged themselves by singing them.

I pumped my fellow-prisoner as dry as I could, for fear I should never
see him again; but at length he showed me which was my bed, and left me
to blow out the lamp.

It was like travelling into a far country, such as I had never expected
to behold, to lie there for one night. It seemed to me that I never
had heard the town-clock strike before, nor the evening sounds of the
village; for we slept with the windows open, which were inside the
grating. It was to see my native village in the light of the Middle
Ages, and our Concord was turned into a Rhine stream, and visions
of knights and castles passed before me. They were the voices of old
burghers that I heard in the streets. I was an involuntary spectator
and auditor of whatever was done and said in the kitchen of the adjacent
village-inn--a wholly new and rare experience to me. It was a closer
view of my native town. I was fairly inside of it. I never had seen its
institutions before. This is one of its peculiar institutions; for it is
a shire town. I began to comprehend what its inhabitants were about.

In the morning, our breakfasts were put through the hole in the door,
in small oblong-square tin pans, made to fit, and holding a pint of
chocolate, with brown bread, and an iron spoon. When they called for the
vessels again, I was green enough to return what bread I had left; but
my comrade seized it, and said that I should lay that up for lunch or
dinner. Soon after he was let out to work at haying in a neighboring
field, whither he went every day, and would not be back till noon; so he
bade me good-day, saying that he doubted if he should see me again.

When I came out of prison--for some one interfered, and paid that tax--I
did not perceive that great changes had taken place on