Time dragged. Not a sound could be heard save the monotonous drip of some leak above. Baudillas counted the falling drops, then wearied of counting, and abandoned the self‐imposed task. Now he heard a far‐away rushing sound, then came a blast of hot vapor blowing in his face. He started into a sitting posture, and clung to his bench. In another moment he heard the roar of water that plunged from above; and a hot steam enveloped him. What was the signification of this? Was the pit to be flooded with scalding water and he drowned in it? In a moment he had found the explanation. The water was being let off from the public baths. There would be no more bathers this night. The tide of tepid water rose nearly level with the ledge on which he was crouching, and then ebbed away and rolled forth at the vent through which by day a pale halo had entered. Half suffocated, part stupefied by the warm vapor, Baudillas sank into a condition without thought, his eyes looking into the blackness above, his ears hearing without noting the dribble from the drain through which the flood had spurted. Presently he was roused by a sense of irritation in every nerve, and putting his hand to his face plucked away some hundred‐ legged creature, clammy and yet hard, that was creeping over him. It was some time before his tingling nerves recovered. Then gradually torpor stole over him, and he was perhaps unconscious for a couple of hours, when again he was roused by a sharp pain in his finger, and starting, he heard a splash, a rush and squeals. At once he knew that a swarm of rats had invaded the place. He had been bitten by one; his start had disconcerted the creatures momentarily, and they had scampered away. Baudillas remained motionless, save that he trembled; he was sick at heart. In this awful prison he dared not sleep, lest he should be devoured alive. Was this to be his end—to be kept awake by horror of the small foes till he could endure the tension no longer, and then sink down in dead weariness and blank indifference on his bench, and at once be assailed from all sides, to feel the teeth, perhaps to attempt an ineffectual battle, then to be overcome and to be picked to his bones? As he sat still, hardly breathing, he felt the rats again. They were rallying, some swimming, some swarming up on to the shelf. They rushed at him with the audacity given by hunger, with the confidence of experience, and the knowledge of their power when attacking in numbers. He cried out, beat with his hands, kicked out with his feet, swept his assailants off him by the score; yet such as could clung to his garment by their teeth and, not discomfited, quickly returned. To escape them he leaped into the mire; he plunged this way, then that; he returned to the wall; he attempted to scramble up it beyond their reach, but in vain.