uttered a few curses, which sounded very shocking in my ears, more from the force of habit, and influence of the place, than from the meaning attached to them, and then hurried on _to the door_. A large bunch of keys was in his hand, and I followed instinctively this pledge of my liberation. (5) Vide Moore’s View of France and Italy. “The door was very low--we descended to it by four steps. He applied his key, muffling it in the sleeve of his habit to suppress the sound. At every application he recoiled, gnashed his teeth, stamped--then applied both hands. The lock did not give way--I clasped my hands in agony--I tossed them over my head. “Fetch a light,” he said in a whisper; “take a lamp from before one of those figures.” The levity with which he spoke of the holy images appalled me, and the act appeared to me nothing short of sacrilege; yet I went and took a lamp, which, with a shuddering hand, I held to him as he again tried the key. During this second attempt, we communicated in whispers those fears that left us scarce breath even for whispers. “Was not that a noise?”--“No, it was the echo of this jarring, stubborn lock. Is there no one coming?”--“Not one.”--“Look out into the passage.”--“Then I cannot hold the light to you.”--“No matter--any thing but detection.”--“Any thing for escape,” I retorted with a courage that made him start, as I set down the lamp, and joined my strength to his to turn the key. It grated, resisted; the lock seemed invincible. Again we tried, with cranched teeth, indrawn breath, and fingers stripped almost to the bone,--in vain.--Again--in vain.--Whether the natural ferocity of his temper bore disappointment worse than mine, or that, like many men of undoubted courage, he was impatient of a _slight_ degree of physical pain, in a struggle where he would have risked and lost life without a murmur,--or how it was, I know not,--but he sunk down on the steps leading to the door, wiped away the big drops of toil and terror from his forehead with the sleeve of his habit, and cast on me a look that was at once the pledge of sincerity and of despair. The clock struck three. The sound rung in my ears like the trumpet of the day of doom--the trumpet that _will sound_. He clasped his hands with a fierce and convulsive agony, that might have pictured the last struggles of the impenitent malefactor,--that agony without remorse, that suffering without requital or consolation, that, if I may say so, arrays crime in the dazzling robe of magnanimity, and makes us admire the fallen spirit, with whom we dare not sympathize. “We are undone,” he cried; “_you_ are undone. At the hour of three another monk is to enter on his hour of recollection.” And he added, in a lower tone of horror inexpressible, “I hear his steps in the passage.” At the moment he uttered these words, the key, that I had never ceased to struggle with, turned in the lock. The door opened, the passage lay free to us. My companion recovered