set a double guard at every
entrance for its better protection.

Arrived at this place, poor Barnaby was marched into a stone-floored
room, where there was a very powerful smell of tobacco, a strong
thorough draught of air, and a great wooden bedstead, large enough for a
score of men. Several soldiers in undress were lounging about, or eating
from tin cans; military accoutrements dangled on rows of pegs along the
whitewashed wall; and some half-dozen men lay fast asleep upon their
backs, snoring in concert. After remaining here just long enough to
note these things, he was marched out again, and conveyed across the
parade-ground to another portion of the building.

Perhaps a man never sees so much at a glance as when he is in a
situation of extremity. The chances are a hundred to one, that if
Barnaby had lounged in at the gate to look about him, he would have
lounged out again with a very imperfect idea of the place, and would
have remembered very little about it. But as he was taken handcuffed
across the gravelled area, nothing escaped his notice. The dry, arid
look of the dusty square, and of the bare brick building; the clothes
hanging at some of the windows; and the men in their shirt-sleeves and
braces, lolling with half their bodies out of the others; the green
sun-blinds at the officers' quarters, and the little scanty trees in
front; the drummer-boys practising in a distant courtyard; the men at
drill on the parade; the two soldiers carrying a basket between them,
who winked to each other as he went by, and slily pointed to their
throats; the spruce serjeant who hurried past with a cane in his hand,
and under his arm a clasped book with a vellum cover; the fellows in the
ground-floor rooms, furbishing and brushing up their different articles
of dress, who stopped to look at him, and whose voices as they
spoke together echoed loudly through the empty galleries and
passages;--everything, down to the stand of muskets before the
guard-house, and the drum with a pipe-clayed belt attached, in one
corner, impressed itself upon his observation, as though he had noticed
them in the same place a hundred times, or had been a whole day among
them, in place of one brief hurried minute.

He was taken into a small paved back yard, and there they opened a great
door, plated with iron, and pierced some five feet above the ground with
a few holes to let in air and light. Into this dungeon he was walked
straightway; and having