"I shall have to write out a report for this fellow!" said the policeman, who had arrested the songster... "and the 'Salad Basket'[10] passes in an hour's time! ... I shall just do it!" [Footnote 10: Prison van.] * * * * * "Have you anyone for the Depot to-day?" asked the driver from his high seat on the prison van. He was on a collecting journey as is usual every evening, when the Salad Baskets, as they are vulgarly called, pass to the various police stations of Paris to pick up the individuals arrested during the day. "Two of 'em," answered the police sergeant on duty. Whilst official papers were being interchanged and forms were being filled in according to rule, policemen went to the cells to bring out the two prisoners to be despatched to the Depot. The first to pass out was the costermonger. He was straightway put into one of the narrow compartments in the Salad Basket. Then it was the turn of the tipsy and obstreperous workman, who was now silent, moody, and apparently sober. "Hop it now!" cried the policeman. "Come along with you, you miserable drunk!... March now!... Foot it!" As the "drunk" hit against the partition of the narrow passageway running up the middle of the Salad Basket, the policeman, with a shove, pushed him into one of the compartments, carefully shutting the little door on him and fastening it. "My word!" he exclaimed. "That fellow wouldn't have been capable of walking three steps in an hour's time!" As the driver climbed to his seat on the van, the policeman called out, with a laugh: "You have a traveller inside who doesn't detest wine!... It's a pity to see a man in such a hoggish state!" This same policeman would have been surprised, could he have seen the bibulous one's face when the Salad Basket cast loose from her moorings and started off in the direction of the Point-du-Jour police station, the last on the round to be visited! The "drunk" whom one push had sufficed to plant on his seat, had briskly drawn himself upright and was smiling broadly, a wide, noiseless smile! "What a joke!... And what a jolly good actor I should have made!" thought Jerome Fandor, giving himself a mental hug of satisfaction.... "Ah! They arrest the individuals I want to set talking!... The police imagine they are going to push in first and find out the answer to the riddle!... We shall see!" Fandor was listening intensely and trying to discover from the movements of the Salad Basket what street they were passing along. "Smooth going ... evidently we are still in the rue de la Pompe, so I have about a quarter of an hour more of it!" Fandor examined the tiny cell in which he had been imprisoned of his own free will. "Not much to be said for it!" ran his thoughts. "There is scarcely room to sit ... impossible to stand up or turn around ... nearly dark ... and precious little air comes in through those wooden shutters!... I shouldn't think there ever had been an escape from these vans!..."