had decided upon his line
of conduct; so he steadfastly refused to supply the required
information, even when threatened with the naked sword which the
official, in a towering rage, drew and flashed before his eyes.

Seeing that this demonstration produced no effect upon the intrepid
young Englishman, Sung-wan--for so the officer was named--gave a few
curt orders to the men who were guarding him, and Frobisher was hurried
from the room, conducted down several long, gloomy corridors, and
finally thrust into a large cell. This, as soon as his eyes became
accustomed to the semi-darkness, he could see was furnished with several
instruments of a horribly suggestive character; and it did not take a
man of his intelligence long to realise that he had at last made the
acquaintance of that supremely diabolic institution--a Korean
torture-chamber.

CHAPTER SIX.

IN THE PRISON CELL.

"By Jove!" exclaimed the prisoner to himself, as his eyes gradually took
in his dreadful surroundings, "I'm sadly afraid that all this means the
end of Murray Frobisher, and a mighty unpleasant end it promises to be.
No escape possible either," he went on, carefully making a tour of the
apartment, and at intervals tapping on the walls with an iron tool which
he had picked up, in an endeavour to obtain some idea of their
thickness, and so to judge as to the possibility of digging himself out,
if he were left alone long enough. But the results were disheartening,
to say the least of it. Every spot where he tapped gave back a dull,
solid sound, indicating that the walls were quite unusually thick, and
that escape by means of excavation or anything of that kind was
absolutely out of the question. The room was somewhat peculiarly
shaped, being evidently situated in one of the angles of the fort. The
wall containing the thick, oaken, iron-studded door through which he had
been thrust was evidently enormously thick, while the chamber itself was
some fifteen feet wide by about thirty-five feet long, the end wall
opposite the door being curved somewhat in the form of an ellipse,
meeting in a blunt angle exactly opposite the door. And high up in this
angle, about eight feet above the floor, was a small, iron-barred
window, which might, but for the bars, have been large enough to permit
of the egress of a man of ordinary size.

The total height of the chamber was about ten feet, and the walls were
almost entirely covered with weird and terrible-l