the discourses of the rugged George Buchanan. Nor can we keep an exclusive hand upon Defoe, whose 'Robinson Crusoe' was but a year old when he began to delight the children of France, and whose Moll Flanders' found at last a perfect interpreter in Marcel Sohwöb, scholar and man of letters. And have And have we not given our Dickens in exchange for Dumas? Some writers there are who will not cross the Channel. The works of Swift, we are told, lose their force and meaning when they reach Calais; and Racine, for a very different reason, is not always treated in London with the respect which his beauty and order deserve. But these and other

exceptions, due due to different temperaments and different trainings, are of small account. And even they will disappear with a wider sympathy and a deeper study. The truth is that the Alliance, which holds together France and Italy and England, is an alliance not only of arms but of arts, and it will last long after the signing of the peace. None of the three will close its ears or its eyes to the influence in art or learning of the other two. And such works of research as Mr Tilley's, reciprocated in France by English studies, no less intelligent and profound, will strengthen the bonds, already strong, which unite us with our friends and our allies.

THAT is how Mr Pickwick and Sam Weller felt about the Fleet Prison, and that is exactly how I felt, as time went on, about the Stadt Vogtei Prison in Berlin. The prison was most emphatically not the place to bring a young man to, and it was better, I felt, in every point of view, that I should not remain there.

We had failed, it is true, in our attempt to get out, but if we had done nothing else, we had at any rate demonstrated the practicability of our theory. The prison was not escapeproof. So much was certain.

As winter was approaching, it behoved us to set to work as soon as possible on fresh plans. The winters in Germany are severe, and we felt that it would be courting disaster to set out, in very cold weather, on an escape which might involve much lying out in the open. To be seen during the day in the danger zone near the frontier would be fatal to success, and, in view of the

measures which were being taken by the German military and police authorities to recapture escapers, it would be equally fatal to leave the train at a station sufficiently close to the frontier to enable us to cross the same night.

We abandoned one scheme after the other on the ground of its impracticability.

One afternoon I was coming up the wearisome flights of stairs which led up to our cell on the fourth floor, when I was accosted in a furtive fashion by a man, S. He was a queer fellow, an engineer by profession, a bigamist, I believe, by sheer force of habit, and as far as nationality was concerned an out and out cosmopolitan. Interned as an Englishman, he had been brought to the prison from Ruhleben Camp on some charge or other, and had been frequently heard to say that he was determined to escape. He had lived a long time in South Africa, Belgium, and Germany, spoke excellent

German, fair Flemish, indifferent French, and abominable English. I had known for some time that he wished to see me, but I had deliberately avoided meeting him, because I doubted the sincerity of his desire to escape, and, in any event, was pledged to my friends. On this particular occasion, however, there was no escape from him, and, impelled too by curiosity as to what his plans might be, I followed him into his cell. I soon came to the conclusion that his desire to escape was genuine. There was the prospeot before him of a long prison sentence, and he was bent upon cheating the police of their prey. I listened as he unfolded his schemes, talking little myself, except occasionally to drop a word of criticism or ask a question.

When he had finished I told him that I thought his scheme unsound, and gave my reasons. He shrugged his shoulders and sat very disconsolately on his stool, with his hands spread out on his knees.

"Well, what do you think is the best plan? Have you a better idea?" he asked.

With very little seriousness in my words I said—

"Yes; I think I have. Find some way of getting out of the front door, out of the main exit."

He grew serious. We discussed possibilities for a while, and then I left him.

Although I had made the suggestion with a serious face I meant it mainly as a joke, but the idea struck root in his

ingenious mind, and it was through the main door that we escaped from the prison about three weeks later.

In the narration of this escape I am free to give fairly full details of what took place, partly owing to the fact that all who participated in it are now in safety, thanks either to subsequent escape or release, and also because the escape was undertaken in such a way that the German authorities learned very soon afterwards the lines on which we had worked. Conditions in the prison were changed immediately after our escape was discovered, and steps were taken to cut off the main exit for ever afterwards as a possible avenue of escape. The interned were no longer permitted to use the yard at any time from 9 A.M. to 6 P.M. when not in solitary confinement, but were passed in by the sentry at stated times, the yard door being kept locked by him.

All the courtyards in the prison are inside the huge block of buildings. There is no wall fencing in the prison from the street. One steps at once from the street into the gloom of the jail through heavy oaken doors. The first step takes one into a sort of vestibule. Facing the outer doors, inside the vestibule, are other oaken doors leading into the exercise-yard for our part of the prison. To the left of the entrance are two steps and then a corridor not more than twenty paces in length leading into the administrative office. The office is used by the

lieutenant, sergeant, warders, and corporals who guard the prisoners. To the right of the entrance is another corridor, but in our time the door leading into it from the vestibule was usually closed and looked. Along the two corridors mentioned were, on the one side, heavily barred non-transparent windows giving on giving on to the Direksen Strasse, and on the other side the doors of cells on the ground floor. The third cell along the corridor to the left of the entrance was the porter's cell, where a German corporal armed with bayonet and Browning revolver was kept on guard day and night. After our escape the first cell was made the porter's cell, and a special window was built into the wall, so that when fitted with an ingenious arrangement of mirrors the sentry could see at once if any one attempted to open the main door. Each time we escaped quite a lot of Prussian officials were kept busy trying to catch us, and, when they had locked us up again, trying to devise ways and means of preventing another attempt. I suppose it all belonged to the conduct of war, and that we may have been "doing our bit" after all, "tying up" and annoying an infinitesimal part of the Kaiser's army for a day or two!

From the description I have given of the prison inside the main gate, it will be obvious that in attempting to open the main door certain risks would have to be faced. There would

always be the possibility of being seen by the sentry in the cell close to the main gate. There was the danger of persons coming from the yard into the vestibule. There was the risk of the door of the administrative office-twenty paces along the straight corridor-being opened, when all would be lost, owing to the fact that a German corporal, and frequently the lieutenant in charge of the jail, sat at their desks in such a position as to command an uninterrupted view of the main entrance. At any moment the door on the right-hand side of the main gate, the one leading into the right-hand portion of the prison, might be opened by a warder passing through; and finally, there came the risk

against which all the forethought in the world would not enable us to guard-of a transport of prisoners arriving at the door at the very moment of our escape. To a certain extent, by means of a careful disposition of forces, and by a rehearsal of the right sort of story to tell, in the event of being surprised before we had actually opened the door, we thought it possible to guard against all risks except the last. There we should have to take a sporting chance.

One afternoon, when I entered our cell after an aimless walk through the smelly, monotonous galleries, I was accosted by one of my cell companions, who said to me

"G-- has been here to see you, and would like you to go down to his cell before look

ing-up time, as he has some sketches he would like to show to you."

I smiled, and my friend smiled. G had escaped some time before from Ruhleben Camp, along with his friend C-, and, possessing the two invaluable assets, from escaper's point of view, of a perfect command of the language, and a thorough knowledge of the country and the ways of the people, they suoceeded in reaching the Swiss frontier, passed over during the day, but unfortunately, unwittingly walked back into Germany, and were arrested by two German sentries. They had not taken into account that they had crossed the German-Swiss frontier at a point where a narrow tongue of Swiss territory runs into Germany. They had walked into freedom on one side of the tongue and back into bondage on the other side. He and his friend were charged, after capture, with having attempted to bribe the German guards who accompanied them from the Swiss frontier to the Stadt Vogtei Prison in Berlin, and both men, I knew, were eager to avoid the long term of imprisonment which would surely be the consequence of conviotion in the Berlin Police Court. At a later date, C—, G▬▬'s companion-after G-- had made good his escape-was tried on a charge of attempted bribery, and sentenced to six months' imprisonment. He showed me a copy of the judgment, in which the judge who had tried the case had put his

VOL. CCIV.—NO. MCCXXXIII.

C, who had lived thirtyfive years in Germany, had been decidedly pro-German in his sympathies for some time after the outbreak of war, but if he had not become antiGerman before the date of his trial, he certainly swung round when he found himself face to face with so wicked a mockery of the very elements of justice.

I say that I smiled when I heard that G had been to see me and wished to show me sketches. I went down to his cell, and had not been in conversation with him long before I learned that he had certain proposals to make to me regarding escape from the prison. He said that three, including S-, had decided to escape through the main door, that a duplicate key was almost ready, and all that remained to be done before the night of the escape was to make perfectly sure that the key would fit. While the stage rehearsals were going on, one man was to hold the door leading from the exercise-yard into the vestibule, in order that no one

H