us for! _I_ had a right to be exchanged ten times over, though he might have called Wright a spy; but what was my poor wife and her newborn baby, or my old father’s grey hairs, to _him_, and his damnable ambition to make everything his own—and when the very thought of me in my hole at the Temple would strike him in the midst of his victories, where he hadn’t time, forsooth, to trouble himself about a poor man like me! The fact was, I could tell how he offered a British seaman, that had had a finger in nettling him, the command of one of his seventy-fours, which he had nobody fit to manage—and that in a prison where I’d be glad even of fresh air! “’Twas then, in fact, the purpose rose firmer and firmer in me, out of the fury that was like to drive me mad, how I’d get out of his clutches, and spend my life against the very pitch of his power I knew so well about. Till that time I used to look through the bars of the window at the Seine, without ever fancying escape, low down as it was, compared with my last cell. There was a mark in the stone floor with my walking back and forward, since they put me in; and by this time I had the cunning of a beast, let alone its strength, in regard of anything I took into my head: often I used to think I saw the end of my finger, or the corner of a stone, more like the way a fly sees them, than a man. The turnkey, Pierre, would never let me have a knife to eat my food with, lest I should do as he said all we English were apt to do—kill myself—which, by the way, is a lie; and I think that fiend of an Emperor yonder must have taught them to blame us with their own crime! However, latterly he let me have a fork for half an hour at dinner; and for a quarter of an hour every day, except those when he staid to talk to me as I ate it, did I climb up and work with that fork at the top and bottom of one of the window-bars, taking care not to break the fork, and jumping down, always, in time to finish the meal. It took me four whole months, sir, to loosen them! Such deadly fear as I was in, too, lest he’d find it out, or lest they moved me to another cell—you’d have thought I was fond of the walls round the place, where hundreds of men before me had scrawled their last words; and the one that shot himself had written, “_Liberté—anéantissement!_ Liberty—annihilation!” just over where the spatter of his brains had stuck when he laid his head to the spot! If Pierre had noticed what I’d been about, my mind was made up to kill him, and then make the trial before they missed him; but _that_ I had a horror of, after all, seeing the man had taken a sort of liking to me, and I knew he had a wife.