"I should like to have Bigley, sir," I said. "Will one be sufficient?" "Quite, sir," I said; for I thought Measles and I could manage it between us. Half an hour after, Measles was busy at work, fetching up muskets, with bayonets fixed, from down in the vault, and laying them in order on the flat roof, taking care the while to keep out of sight; and I went to the room where the women were, under Mrs Bantem's management, getting ready for what was to come, for they had been told that we might leave the place all at once. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ STORY ONE, CHAPTER NINETEEN. I suppose it was my wound made me do things in a sluggish dreamy way, and made me feel ready to stop and look at any little thing which took my attention. Anyhow, that's the way I acted; and going inside that room, I stopped short just within the place, for there were those two little children of the colonel's sitting on the floor, with a whole heap of those numbers of the Bible--those that people take in shilling parts--and with two or three large pictures in each. Some one had given them the parts to amuse themselves with; and, as grand and old-fashioned as could be, they were showing these pictures to the soldiers' children. As I went in, they'd got a picture open of Jacob lying asleep, with his dream spread before you, of the great flight of steps leading up into heaven, and the angels going up and down. "There," says little Jenny Wren to a boy half as old again as herself; "those are angels, and they're coming down from heaven, and they've got beautiful wings like birds." "O," says little Cock Robin thoughtfully, and he leaned over the picture. Then he says quite seriously: "If they've dot wings, why don't they fly down?" That was a poser; but Jenny Wren was ready with her answer, old-fashioned as could be, and she says: "I should think it's toz they were moulting." I remember wishing that the poor little innocents had wings of their own, for it seemed to me that they would be a sad trouble to us to get away that night, just at the time when a child's most likely to be cross and fretful. Night at last, dark as dark, save only a light twinkling here and there, in different parts where the enemy had made their quarters. There was a buzzing in the camp where the guns were, and as we looked over, once there came the grinding noise of a wheel, but only once. We made sure that the gate and the broken window opening were well watched, for there was the white calico of the sentries to be seen; but soon the darkness hid them, and we should not have known that they were there but for the faint spark now and then which showed that they were smoking, and once I heard, quite plain in the dead stillness, the sound made by a "hubble-bubble" pipe. We waited one hour, and then, with six of as on the roof, the plan I made began to be put into operation.