and of condoling with you on the calamity that
has brought you among us. May it soon
terminate happily! It would be an impertinence
elsewhere, but it is not so here, to ask your
name and condition?"

Charles Darnay roused himself, and gave the
required information, in words as suitable as he
could find.

"But I hope," said the gentleman, following
the chief gaoler with his eyes, who moved across
the room, "that you are not in secret?"

"I do not understand the meaning of the
term, but I have heard them say so."

"Ah, what a pity! We so much regret it!
But take courage; several members of our
society have been in secret, at first, and it has
lasted but a short time." Then he added, raising
his voice, "I grieve to inform the society—in
secret."

There was a murmur of commiseration as
Charles Darnay crossed the room to a grated
door where the gaoler awaited him, and many
voices—among which, the soft and compassionate
voices of women were conspicuous—gave him
good wishes and encouragement. He turned
at the grated door, to render the thanks of
his heart; it closed under the gaoler's hand;
and the apparitions vanished from his sight for
ever.

The wicket opened on a stone staircase, leading
upward. When they had ascended forty
steps (the prisoner of half an hour already
counted them), the gaoler opened a low black
door, and they passed into a solitary cell. It
struck cold and damp, but was not dark.

"Yours," said the gaoler.

"Why am I confined alone?"

"How do I know!"

"I can buy pen, ink, and paper?"

"Such are not my orders. You will be visited,
and can ask then. At present, you may buy
your food, and nothing more."

There were in the cell, a chair, a table, and a
straw mattress. As the gaoler made a general
inspection of these objects, and of the four walls,
before going put, a wandering fancy wandered
through the mind of the prisoner leaning against
the wall opposite to him, that this gaoler was so
unwholesomely bloated, both in face and person,
as to look like a man who had been drowned
and filled with water. When the gaoler was
gone, he thought, in the same wandering way,
"Now am I left, as if I were dead." Stopping
then, to look down at the mattress, he turned
from it with a sick feeling, and thought, "And
here in these crawling creatures is the first
condition of the body after death."

"Five paces by four and a half, five paces by
four and a half, five paces by four and a half."
The prisoner walked to and fro in his cell, counting
its measurement, and the roar of the city
arose like muffled drums with a wild swell of
voices added to them. "He made shoes, he
made shoes, he made shoes." The prisoner
counted the measurement again, and paced faster,
to draw his mind with him from that latter
repetition. "The ghosts that vanished when
the wicket closed. There was one among them,
the appearance of a lady dressed in black,
who was leaning in the embrasure of a window,
and she had a light shining upon her golden
hair, and she looked like *  *  *  *  Let
us ride on again, for God's sake, through
the illuminated villages with the people all
awake! *  *  *  * He made shoes, he made
shoes, he made shoes. *  *  *  * Five paces by
four and a half."  With such scraps tossing
and rolling upward from the depths of his mind,
the prisoner walked faster and faster, obstinately
counting and counting; and the roar of tlhe
city changed to this extent—that it still rolled
in like muffled drums, but with the wail of
voices that he knew, in the swell that rose above
them.

         UNDER THE MICROSCOPE.

SOME years ago a minute bit of nondescript
something, looking more like a fragment of an
old trunk with all the hair worn off than
anything else, was sent to an eminent
microscopist, to determine what it was. The
microscopist placed it in the "field," and pronounced
it to be a bit of human skin—the skin of a fair
man—covered with the hairs which grew on the
naked parts of the body. Now the fragment
had been taken from under a nail on an old
church door in Yorkshire, where, just one
thousand years ago, the skin of a Danish robber,
who had committed sacrilege and been flayed
for the offence, had been nailed up, kitewise, as
a warning to all evil doers. Time and weather
had long ago destroyed all traces of this Danish
Marsyas; but the tradition remained in full force,
when some one, more anxious than the rest,
scraped away a portion of the door from under
one of the nails, transmitted the same to a
microscopist, and printed the result as we have
given it.

Another time microscopy was made to play
even a more important part as evidence. In a
certain late murder, where the victim had had
his throat cut through both shirt and neckerchief,
the prisoner attempted to explain away
the presence of blood on a knife, which was
assumed to have been the instrument of murder,
by saying that he had cut some raw beef with
it, and forgotten to wipe it afterwards. The
knife, with the blood upon its blade and shaft,
was sent to a microscopist, and the following
was the chain of facts which he educed from it:

      1. The stain was blood.

      2. It was not the blood of dead flesh, but of
a living body, for it had coagulated where it
was found.

      3. It was not the blood of an ox, sheep, or
hog.

      4. It was human blood.

      5 . Among the blood were mixed certain
vegetable fibres.

      6. They were cotton fibres, agreeing with
those of the murdered man's shirt and
neckerchief, which had both been cut through.