joy comes grief; and so it was with them. The only
thing that they found was a goodly store of provision laid up.
Hence they may have thought that this was the place that the
mistress of the house meant; in fact, an answer might have been
given from it to the call of a person in the room mentioned by
her.

"They stuck to their purpose, however, of stripping off all the
wainscot of the other large room. So they set a man to work near
the ceiling, close to the place where I was: for the lower part
of the walls was covered with tapestry, not with wainscot. So
they stripped off the wainscot all round till they came again
to the very place where I lay, and there they lost heart and
gave up the search.

"My hiding-place was in a thick wall of the chimney behind a
finely inlaid and carved mantelpiece. They could not well take
the carving down without risk of breaking it. Broken, however,
it would have been, and that into a thousand pieces, had they
any conception that I could be concealed behind it. But knowing
that there were two flues, they did not think that there could
be room enough there for a man.

"Nay, before this, on the second day of the search, they had
gone into the room above, and tried the fireplace through which
I had got into my hole. They then got into the chimney by a ladder
to sound with their hammers. One said to another in my hearing,
'Might there not be a place here for a person to get down into
the wall of the chimney below by lifting up this hearth?' 'No,'
answered one of the pursuivants, whose voice I knew, 'you could
not get down that way into the chimney underneath, but there
might easily be an entrance at the back of this chimney.' So
saying he gave the place a knock. I was afraid that he would hear
the hollow sound of the hole where I was.

"Seeing that their toil availed them nought, they thought that
I had escaped somehow, and so they went away at the end of the
four days, leaving the mistress and her servants free. The yet
unbetrayed traitor stayed after the searchers were gone. As soon
as the doors of the house were made fast, the mistress came to
call me, another four days buried Lazarus, from what would have
been my tomb, had the search continued a little longer. For I
was all wasted and weakened as well with hunger as with want
of sleep and with having to sit so long in such a narrow space.
After coming out I was seen by the traitor, whose treachery was
still unknown to us. He did