him figuring in white calico! He dropped the
ladder to the ground, and the iron hooks clanked as they fell together.
I hissed a sea blessing at him through my teeth.

"Have you no wick in those tallow-candle fingers of yours? Hush!
Stand motionless."

As I spoke the dog began to bark. That it was the dog belonging to the
house I could not swear. The sound, nevertheless, proceeded from the
direction of the yard in which my sweetheart had told me the dog was
chained. The deep and melancholy note was like that of a bloodhound
giving tongue. It was reverberated by the convent wall and seemed to
penetrate to the farthest distance, awaking the very echoes of the
sleeping river Liane, and it filled the breathless pause that had
fallen upon us with a torment of inquietude and expectation. After a
few minutes the creature ceased.

"He'll be a whopper, sir. Big as a pony, sir, if his voice don't belie
him," said Caudel, fetching a deep breath. "I was once bit by a
dawg----" he was about to spin a yarn.

"For heaven's sake! now bear a hand and get your bull's eye alight," I
angrily whispered, at the same moment snatching up his coat and so
holding it as to effectually screen his figure from the house.

Feeling over the coat he pulled out the little bull's-eye lamp and a
box of matches, and catching with oceanic dexterity the flame of the
lucifer in the hollow of his hands, he kindled the wick, and I
immediately closed the lantern with its glass eclipsed. This done, I
directed my eyes at the black smears of growths--for thus they
showed--lying round about us, in search of a path; but apparently we
were on the margin of some wide tract of vegetables, through which we
should have to thrust to reach the stretch of sward that, according to
the description in my pocket, lay immediately under the balcony from
which my sweetheart was to descend.

"Pick up that ladder--by the hooks--see they don't clank--crouch low;
make a bush of yourself as I do, and come along," said I.

Foot by foot we groped our way towards the tall, thin shadow of the
house through the cabbages--to give the vegetation a name--and
presently arrived at the edge of the sward; and now we had to wait
until the clock struck one. Fortunately there were some bushes here,
but none that rose higher than our girth, and this obliged us to
maintain a posture of stooping which in a short time began to tell upon
Caudel's rheumatic knees, as I knew by his snuffli