on she could be induced
to restore it to its sheath, which truth obliges me to own was inside
her garter. Our prison, an old tower adjoining the lake, had been once
the dungeon of. John Huss, and the torture chamber, as it was still
called, continued to be used for mild transgressors, such as we were.
A small bribe induced the jailer's wife to take poor Tintefleck for the
night into her own quarters, and Vaterchen and I were sole possessors
of the gloomy old hall, which opened by a balcony, railed like a sort of
cage, over the lake.

If the torture chamber had been denuded of its flesh pincers and
thumb-screws, and the other ingenious devices of human cruelty, I am
bound to own that its traditions as a place of suffering had not died
out, as the fleas left nothing to be desired on the score of misery.
Whether it was that they had been pinched by a long fast, or that we
were more tender, cutaneously, than the aborigines, I know not, but I
can safely aver that I never passed such a night, and sincerely trust
that I may never pass such another. Though the air from the lake was
cold and chilly, we preferred to crouch on the balcony to remaining
within the walls; but even here our persecutors followed us.

Vaterchen slept through it all; an occasional convulsive jerk would
show, at times, when one of the enemy had chanced upon some nervous
fibre; but, on the whole, he bore up like one used to such martyrdom,
and able to brave it. As for me, when morning broke, I looked like
a strong case of confluent smallpox, with the addition that my heavy
eyelids nearly closed over my eyes, and my lips swelled out like a
Kaffir's. How that young minx, Catinka, laughed at me. All the old
man's signs, warnings, menaces, were in vain; she screamed aloud with
laughter, and never ceased, even as we were led into the tribunal and
before the dread presence of the judge.

The judgment-seat was not imposing. It was a long, low, ill-lighted
chamber, with a sort of raised counter at one end, behind which sat
three elderly men, dressed like master sweeps,--that is, of the old days
of climbing-boys. The prisoners were confined in a thing like a fold,
and there leaned against one end of the same pen as ourselves, a
square-built, thick-set man of about eight-and-forty, or fifty, dressed
in a suit of coarse drab, and whom, notwithstanding an immense red beard
and moustache, a clear blue eye and broad brow proclaimed to be English.
He was being interro