to be cross
and fretful.

Night at last, dark as dark, save only a light twinkling here and there,
in different parts where the enemy had made their quarters. There was a
buzzing in the camp where the guns were, and as we looked over, once
there came the grinding noise of a wheel, but only once.

We made sure that the gate and the broken window opening were well
watched, for there was the white calico of the sentries to be seen; but
soon the darkness hid them, and we should not have known that they were
there but for the faint spark now and then which shewed that they were
smoking, and once I heard, quite plain in the dead stillness, the sound
made by a "hubble-bubble" pipe.

We waited one hour, and then, with six of us on the roof, the plan I
made began to be put into operation.

My idea was that if we could manage to cross the north alley, which as I
told you was about ten feet wide, we might then go over the roof of the
quarters where the mutineers were; then on to the next roof; which was a
few feet lower; and from there get down on to some sheds, from which it
would be easy to reach the ground, when the way would be open to us, to
escape, with perhaps some hours before we were missed.

The plan was, I know, desperate, but it seemed our only chance, and, as
you well know, desperate ventures will sometimes succeed when the most
carefully arranged plots fail. At all events, Captain Dyer took it up,
and the men under my directions, a couple of muskets were taken at a
time, and putting them muzzle to muzzle, the bayonet of each was thrust
down the other's barrel, which saved lashing them together, and gave us
a sort of spar about ten feet long, and this was done with about fifty.

Did I tell you there was a tree grew up in the centre of the alley--a
stunty, short-boughed tree, and to this Measles laid one of the double
muskets, feeling for a bough to rest it on in the darkness, after
listening whether there was any one below; then he laid more and more,
till with a mattress laid upon them, he formed a bridge, over which he
boldly crept to the tree, where, with the lashings he had taken, he
bound a couple more muskets horizontal, and then shifted the others? He
arranged them all so that the butts of one end rested on the roof of the
palace; the butts at the other end were across those he had bound pretty
level in the tree. Then more and more were laid across, and a couple of
thin straw mattresses on them; and t