I don’t think any nigger could have given him points for brownness, but I liked the looks of him hugely. As we were pulling back, the second officer said to me: ‘Scaped convicts, you bet, poor devils--no business of mine.’ I thought of that smile and forbore to wink.... (Extract from the Diary of a Passenger.) ‘_Sacré!_ these walls are high! lift me, Pierre.’ A very small lean man raised himself with the agility of a cat from his perch in the uplifted grasp of the giant below, and was through a window twelve feet from the ground, and crouching in the shadow of the white curtains without a sound stirring the silence of the night air. Jean Jacques, Frenchman, man of genius, man of diminutive stature, man of sun-baked countenance, political convict, crouched in the shadow of the curtains and reflected. His reflections were the résumé of a carefully matured plan,--in fine, his reflections were these: ‘I, Jean Jacques, am at large; I have not been at large for some time; certainly, then, I wish to remain at large; I wish also my friend Pierre below to remain at large. _Que faire?_’ The reasoning unconsciously took the form of Ollendorf. ‘I am in the room of the four-year-old daughter of the Governor. How do I know this? Because I can see her little socks hanging over the end of the bed. Is not the four-year-old daughter of the Governor the apple of the Governor’s eye? Certainly, she is the apple of the eye of the Governor. Given, then, Jean Jacques, the apple of the eye of the Governor, and the desire to remain at large, what happens? P--s--s--t, it is apparent, any child can see what _must_ happen!’ Jean Jacques rose to the height of his five feet two, his lean, dark face glowing, and his crisp black hair curling with the greatness of his ideas, and advancing, drew aside the curtains of the little bed. A small figure in a wisp of a nightgown stretched her limbs thereon in childish abandon, and turned her elf’s face up to her nocturnal visitor in the unconscious serenity of sleep. That Jean Jacques was a humane man was evidenced by the thoughtful way in which he bestowed dress, socks, slippers, dolls, and sun-bonnet within the capacious folds of his convict’s blouse; that he was a man of energy and action, by the manner in which he enveloped the child’s head in a soft shawl, and her little body in a discarded blanket, and, before she had time or breath to wake and scream, passed himself and her into the upstretched arms of Pierre, and regained the ground. Then two dim figures, with a hostage to liberty, flitted through the deserted streets, and the night swallowed them up. * * * * *