limb from limb. Now a party of a dozen
men came darting through the yard into which the murderer cast fearful
glances from his darkened window; dragging a prisoner along the ground,
whose dress they had nearly torn from his body in their mad eagerness to
set him free, and who was bleeding and senseless in their hands. Now a
score of prisoners ran to and fro, who had lost themselves in the
intricacies of the prison, and were so bewildered with the noise and
glare that they knew not where to turn or what to do, and still cried
out for help as loudly as before. Anon some famished wretch, whose
theft had been a loaf of bread or scrap of butcher's meat, came skulking
past, barefooted--going slowly away because that jail, his house, was
burning; not because he had any other, or had friends to meet, or old
haunts to revisit, or any liberty to gain but liberty to starve and die.
And then a knot of highwaymen went trooping by, conducted by the friends
they had among the crowd, who muffled their fetters as they went along
with handkerchiefs and bands of hay, and wrapped them in coats and
cloaks, and gave them drink from bottles, and held it to their lips,
because of their handcuffs which there was no time to remove. All this,
and Heaven knows how much more, was done amidst a noise, a hurry, and
distraction, like nothing that we know of even in our dreams; which
seemed forever on the rise, and never to decrease for the space of a
single instant.

He was still looking down from his window upon these things, when a band
of men with torches, ladders, axes, and many kinds of weapons, poured
into the yard, and hammering at his door, inquired if there were any
prisoner within. He left the window when he saw them coming, and drew
back into the remotest corner of the cell; but although he returned them
no answer, they had a fancy that some one was inside, for they presently
set ladders against it, and began to tear away the bars at the casement;
not only that, indeed, but with pickaxes to hew down the very stones in
the wall.

As soon as they had made a breach at the window, large enough for the
admission of a man's head, one of them thrust in a torch and looked all
round the room. He followed this man's gaze until it rested on himself,
and heard him demand why he had not answered, but made him no reply.

In the general surprise and wonder, they were used to this; without
saying anything more, they enlarged the breach until it was larg