ew-driver, I found it reasonably rotten with age and damp.

I removed four bricks to make footholes in different positions up the
wall. It was desperately hard and long work, easy as it may sound in
description--especially when I had to hold on by the top of the wall,
with my flat opera hat (as we used to call it in those days) laid, as a
guard, between my hand and the glass, while I cleared a way through the
sharp bottle-ends for my other hand and my knees. This done, my great
difficulty was vanquished; and I had only to drop luxuriously into a
flower-bed on the other side of the wall.

Perfect stillness in the garden: no sign of a light anywhere at the back
of the house: first-floor windows all shut: second-floor windows still
open. I fetched the pruning-ladder; put it against the side of the
porch; tied one end of my bit of rope to the top round of it; took the
other end in my mouth, and prepared to climb to the balcony over the
porch by the thick vine branches and the trellis-work.

No man who has had any real experience of life can have failed to
observe how amazingly close, in critical situations, the grotesque
and the terrible, the comic and the serious, contrive to tread on each
other's heels. At such times, the last thing we ought properly to
think of comes into our heads, or the least consistent event that could
possibly be expected to happen does actually occur. When I put my
life in danger on that memorable night, by putting my foot on the
trellis-work, I absolutely thought of the never-dying Lady Malkinshaw
plunged in refreshing slumber, and of the frantic exclamations Mr.
Batterbury would utter if he saw what her ladyship's grandson was
doing with his precious life and limbs at that critical moment. I am no
hero--I was fully aware of the danger to which I was exposing myself;
and yet I protest that I caught myself laughing under my breath, with
the most outrageous inconsistency, at the instant when I began the
ascent of the trellis-work.

I reached the balcony over the porch in safety, depending more upon
the tough vine branches than the trellis-work during my ascent. My next
employment was to pull up the pruning-ladder, as softly as possible,
by the rope which I held attached to it. This done, I put the ladder
against the house wall, listened, measured the distance to the open
second-floor window with my eye, listened again--and, finding all quiet,
began my second and last ascent. The ladder was comfor