It was early days—in April—to offer any decided opinion as to what the vegetables were likely to be. If they turned out to be crops which were not high enough to offer adequate cover to the escapers, there would be no choice—as the sketch will show—but to tunnel grimly on till the rye-field was reached, several yards further away. But the rye would be cut in early August at latest, and meanwhile the tunnel had advanced barely ten yards beyond the outside wall, and at best a two-foot progress crowned during this period the effort of each laborious day. This meant about 40 yards still to tunnel and three months to go in a losing race, probably, unless progress could be accelerated; and this, as the work took the party further and further from their base, was hardly to be expected. [Illustration: (Scale = roughly 40 yds = inch.) Course of the tunnel (see also frontispiece). ] So it is with the depressed feeling of having to work against time as well as nature that our friends assemble behind the partition on this particular morning. They are standing, or rather stooping, at the entrance, and the first thing to do is to light up. Fortunately someone has remembered to bring the matches to-day, so Number 1 lights a couple of precious candles (we were dependent entirely on England for these commodities) and crawls in. He sticks one candle in the pump chamber, which is just round the first corner and about six feet from the entrance, and proceeds on his way with the other. His progress is necessarily slow, very slow, as the tunnel is so small that he is compelled to _wriggle_ along on his elbows and toes. There is no help for this. The hole must be as small as possible, because of the extreme economy to be exercised in the disposition of the displaced earth. Number 2 enters the pump chamber and starts working the pump. This instrument consists of a home-made vertical bellows, manufactured from wood and from the leather of a flying coat, and is operated by Number 2 with his left hand as he sits facing it and looking along the tunnel towards the face. The pump is screwed to wooden uprights which are securely embedded top and bottom in the clay soil, and the air is forced into a pipe composed of tin tubes made out of biscuit boxes. Little did the glorious company of biscuit makers suspect that in sending us our means of sustenance they were also contributing to an important escape. This pipe is sunk in the floor of the tunnel and is kept always close to the face by the addition of more and yet more tubes.