and followed. Some recollection made him smile as he was going
down the steps: it was that of a stout man lying at the bottom, shaken
in every bone, yet sound as a grape ensconced in jelly. As he touched
the bottom he heard a little noise as of some small substance falling,
but seeing a piece of old mortar dislodged, he did not turn round to
examine the place. If he had done so he would have found behind the
ladder the wedge he had just inserted to secure the level of the
"Inspector's step."

Unwinding his coil of tow, which had been steeped in saltpetre to make
a long fuse, with a toss of his long legs he crossed the barricade of
solid oak rails about six feet high securely fastened across the vault,
for the enclosure of the dangerous storage. Inside it was a passage,
between chests of arms, dismounted cannon, and cases from every
department of supply, to the explosive part of the magazine,
the devourer of the human race, the pulp of the marrow of the
Furies--gunpowder.

Of this there was now collected here, and stored in tiers that reached
the roof, enough to blow up half the people of England, or lay them
all low with a bullet before it; yet not enough, not a millionth part
enough, to move for the breadth of a hair the barrier betwixt right
and wrong, which a very few barrels are enough to do with a man who has
sapped the foundations. Treading softly for fear of a spark from his
boots, and guarding the lantern well, Carne approached one of the casks
in the lower tier, and lifted the tarpaulin. Then he slipped the wooden
slide in the groove, and allowed some five or six pounds to run out upon
the floor, from which the cask was raised by timber baulks. Leaving the
slide partly open, he spread one end of his coil like a broad lamp-wick
in the pile of powder which had run out, and put a brick upon the tow
to keep it from shifting. Then he paid out the rest of the coil on the
floor like a snake some thirty feet long, with the tail about a yard
inside the barricade. With a very steady hand he took the candle from
inside the horn, and kindled that tail of the fuse; and then replacing
his light, he recrossed the open timber-work, and swiftly remounted the
ladder of escape. "Twenty minutes' or half an hour's grace," he thought,
"and long before that I shall be at the yew-tree."

But, as he planted his right foot sharply upon the top step of the
ladder, that step swung back, and cast him heavily backwards to the
bottom. The