ight for weight, and a
quarter in my favour. That was soon settled. In the evening the men
duly came, not the few I had supposed, but so many that they filled my
courtyards, yet managing to remain curiously, silent. For them an
important turning-point had been reached; they would make small
fortunes if the thing went through successfully. With scales in front
of me and gold alongside, we weighed and calculated unendingly--weight
for weight, with that one quarter in my favour. It took two hours and
more, for these common men were very careful, and everything had to be
written down and recorded with strange marks and numbers, denoting the
private division of profits which would afterwards follow. In the end
everything was finished with and bought. Then the men stood up and
shook themselves as if they had been bathed in a perspiration of
anxiety, and the spokesman, a dark man with a quick tongue, which
showed that he had not always been a soldier, thanked me curtly. When
they had drunk, at my request, he explained to me how it was done.
There was something dramatic in the way he described. It was so
simple. I recorded what he said so as not to forget. "When it's dark"
he said, in a low voice, with no introduction, "there's only the
picquets. They have everything to themselves excepting that the
Frenchies are just alongside. The Frenchies watch us close, but we
watch them closer, and there's always a way. Rounds are not kept up
the whole night, for everything is slack now, and when they are
finished the fun begins. The reliefs, lying on the ground, strip off
everything so that they can crawl like snakes and that no one can get
hold of them. They crawl in through holes, over walls, with never a
match or a light to show them how. In the end they get inside." The
man laughed a little hoarsely, spat, and again went on.

"The palace they call the Little Detached Palace will soon be picked
clean--clean as any dog's bone, with the Frenchies only fifteen feet
off, and you'll get nothing more from there. Sometimes the Frenchies
suspect and want to march right in on us, but our corporals are
waiting, and are ready for them, and our bayonets stop them short.
Twice it's happened that their officers march a guard right up to the
gates of the Little Detached, and want to stay there all night with
our fellows crawling about inside. They suspected. But we bluffed them
away every time, and now that all the good things are gone we are
carry