e a fatal course. Here,
here!" seizing him again and dragging him with her. "You were right to
kill that ruffian! to cane him to death--like the Russian grand-dukes,
he was not born to die by the sword. To abduct one woman while paying
court to another, the traitor! But, never heed that! He is punished, and
you must be saved. Here is an outlet: pursue the passage to the end and
leave the town!"

"But I--"

"How can you repay me? Bah! repay me in the other world--below, with a
drop of cold water when I parch!" And with a dulcet yet demoniacal
laugh, the singular creature pushed him into a lightless lobby, slammed
a door and seemed to run away, singing the refrain of the waltz which
was to haunt him forever-more.

CHAPTER V.

UNDER MUNICH.

After an instant's reflection in the impenetrable shades, Claudius
concluded to follow the advice of the variety theatre's prima donna.
While a stranger to the City of Breweries, he knew that its
predestination toward thirst was due to its being the site of an ancient
rock-salt mine. In other cities, subterraneans were melodramatic; here,
a labyrinth under the surface and at the level of the dancing and
drinking cellars was so natural that a child of Munich, dropped into a
well, would have no misgivings as to his worming his way up into the
outer air.

At the worst, when pressed by hunger, he could no doubt make an appeal
to the mounted patrol by night or the foot-passengers by day, whom he
would hear overhead, and be released from this living burial at the cost
of the imprisonment and trial which he had temporarily evaded.

Remembering that he had a box of cigar-lights, and regretting again the
want of the cloak so useful in these damp passages, he lighted a match
and began his flight by the sole opening that he spied. An odor of
sausages, cheese and coarse tobacco was here and there strong, and he
correctly divined that at these points, fugitives, probably from the
same enemy as he fled, had recently made halts. Once assured that he was
in a kind of thoroughfare, though one for the nefarious, he felt bolder
and more hopeful about reaching a desirable goal.

He did not pause to think, as he continued, choosing, where there was a
bifurcation, the most trampled corridor, hewn originally by the miners'
pick. But he had much on his mind for future elaboration. Heretofore no
man could have lived a less eventful life, passed among books, globes,
drawing tools and lecture