was so small that it was
utterly impossible to pass even his head up it, he drew the two blocks
of wood over to the window, and was able, by placing one above the other
and standing on tiptoe on the highest, to reach the bars which guarded
it. Drawing himself up, and fixing one toe in an inequality of the
wall, he managed to look out on to the courtyard which they had just
quitted. The carriage and De Vivonne were passing out through the gate
as he looked, and he heard a moment later the slam of the heavy door and
the clatter of hoofs from the troop of horsemen outside. The seneschal
and his retainers had disappeared; the torches, too, were gone, and,
save for the measured tread of a pair of sentinels in the yard twenty
feet beneath him, all was silent throughout the great castle.

And a very great castle it was. Even as he hung there with straining
hands his eyes were running in admiration and amazement over the huge
wall in front of him, with its fringe of turrets and pinnacles and
battlements all lying so still and cold in the moonlight. Strange
thoughts will slip into a man's head at the most unlikely moments. He
remembered suddenly a bright summer day over the water when first he had
come down from Albany, and how his father had met him on the wharf by
the Hudson, and had taken him through the water-gate to see Peter
Stuyvesant's house, as a sign of how great this city was which had
passed from the Dutch to the English. Why, Peter Stuyvesant's house and
Peter Stuyvesant's Bowery villa put together would not make one wing of
this huge pile, which was itself a mere dog-kennel beside the mighty
palace at Versailles. He would that his father were here now; and
then, on second thoughts, he would not, for it came back to him that he
was a prisoner in a far land, and that his sight-seeing was being done
through the bars of a dungeon window.

The window was large enough to pass his body through if it were not for
those bars. He shook them and hung his weight upon them, but they were
as thick as his thumb and firmly welded. Then, getting some strong hold
for his other foot, he supported himself by one hand while he picked
with his knife at the setting of the iron. It was cement, as smooth as
glass and as hard as marble. His knife turned when he tried to loosen
it. But there was still the stone. It was sandstone, not so very hard.
If he could cut grooves in it, he might be able to draw out bars,
cement, and