of which was his small grated window. "Snow piled against
this window now! We shall be buried under it in winter."

"You will have good fires in winter."

"In winter! Yes! this night; or I shall never see winter."

"This night! Oh, certainly! You can have a fire, though it is not
usual with us at this season. Bellines--a fire here immediately."

He saw his prisoner surveying, by the dim light from the deep window,
the miserable cell--about twenty-eight feet by thirteen, built of blocks
of stone, its vaulted ceiling so low that it could be touched by the
hand; its floor, though planked, rotten and slippery with wet; and no
furniture to be seen but a table, two chairs, and two heaps of straw in
opposite corners.

"I am happy," said the Commandant, "to have been able to avoid putting
you underground. The orders I have had, from the First Consul himself,
as to your being _mis au secret_, are very strict. Notwithstanding
that, I have been able, you see, to place you in an apartment which
overlooks the courtyard; and which, too, affords you other objects"--
pointing through the gratings to the few feet of the pavement without,
and the few yards of the perpendicular rock opposite, which might be
seen through the loop-hole.

"How many hours of the day and night are we to pass in tills place?"

"How many hours? We reckon twenty-four hours to the day and night, as
is the custom in Europe," replied Rubaut; whether in ignorance or irony,
his prisoner could not, in the dim twilight, ascertain. He only learned
too surely that no exit from this cell was to be allowed.

Firewood and light were brought. Rubaut, eager to be busy till he could
go, and to be gone as soon as possible, found fault with some
long-deceased occupant of the cell, for having covered its arched
ceiling with grotesque drawings in charcoal; and then with Bellines, for
not having dried the floor. Truly the light gleamed over it as over a
pond. Bellines pleaded in his defence that the floor had been dried
twice since morning; but that there was no stopping the melting of the
ice above. The water would come through the joints till the winter
frosts set in.

"Ay, the winter frosts--they will set all to rights. They will cure the
melting of the ice, no doubt." Turning to his prisoners, he
congratulated himself on not being compelled to search their persons.
The practice of searching was usual, but might, he rejoiced to say, be
dispensed with on