Thus encouraged, he devoted himself with unremitting energy to his gigantic task of making a practicable hole in the wall. He found bricks in the first outward layers, and then came upon large quarry stones. His first difficulty was to dispose of the debris and material produced by the excavation; after reserving a part to replace and so conceal the aperture formed, the rest he gradually distributed when ground down into dust. The quarry stones gave infinite trouble, but he tackled them with the irons extracted from his bedstead, and he got other tools from his sentries,--an old ramrod and a soldier’s clasp knife. The labour of piercing this wall of seven feet in thickness was incredible. It was an ancient building, the mortar was very hard, and it was necessary to grind the stones into dust. It lasted over six months, and at length the outer layer of bricks on the side of the adjoining casemate was reached. Fortune now favoured Von der Trenck in the discovery of a veteran grenadier among his guards, named Gefhardt, who proved to be of inestimable service then and afterwards, and a devoted ally. Through the sentries’ good offices, Trenck was enabled to communicate with his friends outside, and through Gefhardt he made the acquaintance across the palisades of a Jewish girl of Dessau, Esther Heymannin, whose father was serving a sentence of ten years’ imprisonment in Magdeburg. With splinters cut from his bed board, the prisoner manufactured a long staff which reached from his window beyond the palisades, and by means of it obtained writing materials, a knife and a file. This was effected by Esther with the assistance of two friendly sentries. Trenck wrote to his sister, who resided at Hammer, a village fourteen miles from Berlin, begging her to hand over a sum in cash to the girl when she called; he wrote another letter to the Austrian ambassador in Berlin, enclosing a bill on his agent in Vienna, for Trenck, although in the Prussian service, was of Austrian extraction and owned estates in that country. The girl succeeded in her mission to Hammer and took the money to Berlin, where the Austrian minister’s secretary, Weingarten, assured her that a larger sum was on its way from Vienna, and that if she would return to Berlin after carrying her first good news to Magdeburg, it would be handed over to her. But on approaching the prison, the wife of one of the sentries met her with the sad news that both men had been arrested and lay in irons awaiting sentence, and Esther, rightly judging that all was discovered, hurriedly fled to Dessau. It may be added that the thousand florins to come from Vienna were retained by the Austrian secretary, and although Trenck years later, after his release, made constant applications to both Count Puebla and Weingarten, he never recovered the money. Weingarten had acted the traitor throughout and it was on his information, extracted from the Jewish girl, that the plot to escape became known. The consequences