and frigid, and hung with a yellow-green sprigged paper, at fifteen sous the piece. A white pale light came through a large window with small panes, which was on the left, and occupied the whole width of the room; you looked about you, but saw nobody; you listened, but heard neither a footstep nor a human sound; the walls were bare, and the room unfurnished--there was not even a chair. You looked again, and saw in the wall facing the door a square hole covered with a black knotty substantial cross-barred grating, which formed diamonds--I had almost written meshes--at least an inch and a half across. The little green sprigs on the yellow paper came right up to these bars, calmly and orderly, and the funereal contact did not make them start or wither. Even supposing that any human being had been so wondrously thin as to attempt to go in or out by the square hole, the bars would have prevented him: but though they did not let the body pass, the eyes, that is to say, the mind, could. It seemed as if this had been thought of, for it had been lined with a tin plate, in which were bored thousands of holes more microscopic than those of a strainer. Beneath this plate was an opening exactly like the mouth of a letter-box, and a bell-wire hung by the side of this hole. If you pulled this wire, a bell tinkled, and you heard a voice close to you which made you start. "Who is there?" the voice asked. It was a female voice, a gentle voice, so gentle that it was melancholy. Here, again, there was a magic word which it was necessary to know; if you did not know it, the voice ceased, and the wall became silent again, as if the terrifying darkness of the tomb were on the other side. If you knew the word, the voice continued,--"Turn to the right." You then noticed, facing the window, a door, the upper part of which was of gray painted glass. You raised the latch, walked in, and experienced precisely the same expression as when you enter a box at the theatre, before the gilt grating has been lowered and the chandelier lighted. You were in fact in a species of box, scarce lighted by the faint light that came through the glass door, narrow, furnished with two old chairs and a ragged sofa,--a real box with a black entablature to represent the front. This box had a grating; but it was not made of gilt wood as at the opera, but was a monstrous trellis-work of frightfully interlaced iron bars, fastened to the wall by enormous clamps that resembled clenched fists. When the first few moments were past, and your eye began to grow accustomed to this cellar-like gloom, you tried to look through the grating, but could not see more than six inches beyond it; there it met a barrier of black shutters, connected and strengthened by cross-beams, and painted of a ginger-bread yellow. These shutters were jointed, divided into long thin planks, and covered the whole width of the grating; they were always closed. At the expiration of a few minutes you heard a voice