ich looked bigger and grayer than ever by the
starlight,--Rectus said he would like to get inside of it by night, and
I agreed that it would be a good thing to do. So we went over the
drawbridge (this place has a drawbridge, and portcullises, and
barbicans, and demi-lunes, and a moat, just as if it were a castle or a
fort of some old country in Europe),--but the big gate was shut. We
didn't care to knock, for all was dark, and we came away. Rectus
proposed that we should reconnoitre the place, and I agreed, although,
in reality, there wasn't anything to reconnoitre. We went down into the
moat, which was perfectly dry, and very wide, and walked all around the
fort.

We examined the walls, which were pretty jagged and rough in some
places, and we both agreed that if we _had_ to do it, we believed we
could climb to the top.

As we walked home, Rectus proposed that we should try to climb in some
night.

"What's the good?" I asked.

"Why, it would be a splendid thing," said he, "to scale the walls of an
old Middle-Age fort, like that. Let's try it, anyway."

I couldn't help thinking that it would be rather a fine thing to do, but
it did seem rather foolish to risk our necks to get over the walls at
night, when we could walk in, whenever we pleased, all day.

But it was of no use to say anything like that to Rectus. He was full of
the idea of scaling the walls, and I found that, when the boy did get
worked up to anything, he could talk first-rate, and before we went to
sleep I got the notion of it, too, and we made up our minds that we
would try it.

The next day we walked around the walls two or three times, and found a
place where we thought we could get up, if we had a rope fastened to the
top of the wall. When General Oglethorpe bombarded the fort,--at the
time the Spaniards held it,--he made a good many dents in the wall, and
these would help us. I did climb up a few feet, but we saw that it would
never do to try to get all the way up without a rope.

How to fasten the rope on the top of the wall was the next question. We
went in the fort, and found that if we could get a stout grapnel over
the wall, it would probably catch on the inside of the coping, and give
us a good enough hold. There is a wide walk on top, with a low wall on
the outside, just high enough to shelter cannon, and to enable the
garrison to dodge musketry and arrows.

We had a good deal of trouble finding a rope, but we bought one, at
last,