Well, now, to join on our doings in the cellar (as it were) to those up aloft in the front hall, it was about this time that our meals began to wax irregular. The Breckonside mob, ill led, and incapable of knowing exactly what it wanted, had come and gone, defeated by the cunning of Miss Aphra--very clever woman, Miss Aphra--and the cheerful, innocent brutality of Dr. Hector. There was still talk about us, no doubt, but desultory--some semblance of action, too. In fine, little real work was being done, when our provisions began to get scarce down below in the old stone storehouses of the monks. Indeed, so far as I was concerned, I should have starved if Elsie Stennis, who was still occasionally remembered, had not pushed through the bolt holes long strips of the home-made loaves with which Mad Jeremy supplied her. As for water, she had a spoon tied to the end of the iron rod; and I took it as a babe does pap. It was, I am free to say, most kindly done. For at no time had she too much for herself, and though I do not make too much of a thing like that, neither, on the other hand, do I forget it. After a long, sleepless night of thought, I resolved that the very next evening I should borrow the iron rod from Elsie, which had formerly been used as a rake shaft of the bakery furnace. Elsie passed it to me through the communicating hole. But there was a hooked handle at the end which prevented it coming all the way till Elsie in her dark cupboard had made a hole sufficiently large to push it through; while I, with Elsie's knife, cut out a piece of the wooden lining of my cell so that it could again be fitted in to avoid suspicion. Then I had a thoroughly strong bar of iron in my possession, with which, considerably elated, I began to make a way through into Elsie's room. But it was slow work. The knife had first to be serrated on the back to form a kind of rough saw. I did this with a sort of projecting tooth or claw of the rake handle, where it had been broken off. And I own that the work was not without a certain charm of its own. In my youth I remember--to my shame--to have carried the life of a certain Count of Monte Cristo--whose name I have not met with elsewhere, but with whom I should much have liked to have had business relations--under my waistcoat to school. He appears to have been, like us, a prisoner. And his account of how he pierced thick walls was not wholly without interest. I wished I had kept the notes I made in my pocket-book reporting his manner of procedure. It was from him, for instance, that I got the idea of the rook's feather, while the jackdaws, chunnering to themselves up above and occasionally descending to peck, did the rest. Ultimately I was enabled to cut through the wooden lining of my cell, only to find the wall behind of solid masonry, but with the lime hopefully crumbly round the little holes by which the bars passed into Elsie's cupboard.