Night by night for three weeks we toiled on, and then were bountifully rewarded. We had scraped away the cement between the stone we had selected and those around it, and by prying it with our chisel and one or two other tools we had now procured, we gradually forced it inwards and at length lifted it out and laid it on the floor. It was the middle of the night, but all the men were awake, and in the excitement of the occasion the bosun uttered a shout of triumph, cursing himself immediately afterwards for his folly. The sentry above stopped, and by and by a soldier came into the room below and up the ladder and demanded what was the matter. Luckily I had the presence of mind (and by this time sufficiency of French) to make answer pat. "'Tis the big man in a nightmare," I said with a laugh, "dreaming he heads a boarding party." "Mad dream!" says the Frenchman with a chuckle, and went down again without entering the room. We longed for daylight to reveal the full extent of our success, yet dared not wait for it, for the stone was heavy, and it would take some time to replace it, and since we were always visited soon after daybreak we feared to be intruded on before we had put it back and removed the traces of our work. So we set it again in its place and for the rest of the night slept the sound sleep of contentment. But this success spurred me on to devise some means of easing the work yet to be done. The stone was two feet broad; if the wall was ten feet thick there were four more like it still to be removed, and at the same rate it would be three months before we could tunnel through to the air. And thinking of this my heart fell, for there was not room in the cavity left by the stone for two men to work abreast, so that it might indeed be four months before we saw the end of our toil. I determined, therefore, by some means or other to procure a light, by whose aid I could explore the hole and see if the next stone was cemented with the same care. It chanced that that day we had for dinner a very fat piece of beef. I took advantage of this to pocket some lumps of fat, intending to make a candle with it and a wick composed of some twisted threads from my shirt. The difficulty was to kindle the candle when made, for none of us had a tinder box, though we had steel in our chisel and could easily break a piece of stone from the slab we had loosened. Tolliday was equal to this, however. He pretended that one of the screws of his fiddle had swelled, so that it would not turn freely in the hole, and he got us to ask one of the soldiers to lend him his tinder box, so that he might make a fire of shavings and heat a skewer red hot, with which to burn away the hole. All unsuspicious, the man lent him the box, which, when it was returned to him had somewhat less tinder in it than before.