He managed to saw off the iron bar at its socket, and thus with a widened aperture he succeeded in passing through. He had protected himself with a towel tied to other bars in order to guard against a fall, which would inevitably have been fatal, since his window was sixty feet above the level of the paved yard. My friend found a fulcrum on a small plank which he succeeded in placing at the top of his window, between the brick wall and the horizontal bars which hold the vertical bars. This plank projected about one foot beyond the outer wall. The working out of this scheme was exceedingly daring and dangerous, and almost incredible, and it was not long before the man, supporting himself with one hand on the little plank, reached, with the other, the water spout fixed on the roof, a short distance from the edge. The next instant he disappeared in the darkness. But having reached the roof, he was not yet “out of the wood,” for the outside of the prison formed a wall seventy-five feet high. My friend, however, had made a rope about sixty feet in length. He adjusted one end to the lightning-conductor and let the other end fall down the side of the wall. He slid down this rope to within about fifteen feet of the ground, and from that distance dropped on his feet. We never saw him again, nor heard what became of him. But everyone of us, the officials included, were agreed that this escape was one of the most daring and extraordinary that had ever taken place. CHAPTER XXIII HOPE DEFERRED It was in the month of May, 1916. I had then been a prisoner at the Stadtvogtei for one year. Repeated requests made by myself, through the American Embassy, and made on my behalf by the Canadian and British Governments to secure my freedom, had been of no avail. Sometimes my requests were not even acknowledged. I began to fear I might remain a prisoner until the end of the war. One evening, about seven o’clock, after all prisoners had been locked up for the night, a non-commissioned officer employed in the office of the jail opened my cell and stated that he had good news for me. “What news?” I asked. “You are to be liberated,” he answered. “When?” “The day after to-morrow–Saturday. This news was telephoned a moment ago from the Kommandantur, and I have been instructed to inform you of the fact.” I could not resist shaking the non-commissioned officer’s hand to thank him for the good news he brought to me. My door was hardly closed before I was standing on my chair at the window calling to my companions in captivity–that is to say, the men with whom I was in daily contact. I shouted to them the good news. They called back their congratulations and were sincerely happy at my good fortune.