room, sometimes resting on a stone seat; in either case detained to be imprinted on the memory of the chief and his subordinates.

"Come!" said the chief, at length taking up his keys, "come with me, emigrant."

Through the dismal prison twilight his new charge accompanied him by corridor and staircase, many doors clanging and locking behind them, until they came into a large, low, vaulted chamber, crowded with prisoners of both sexes. The women were seated at a long table, reading and writing, knitting, sewing, and embroidering; the men were for the most part standing behind their chairs, or lingering up and down the room.

In the instinctive association of prisoners with shameful crime and disgrace, the newcomer recoiled from this company. But the crowning unreality of his long unreal ride was their all at once rising to receive him, with every refinement of manner known to the time, and with all the engaging graces and courtesies of life.

So strangely clouded were these refinements by the prison manners and gloom, so spectral did they become in the inappropriate squalor and misery through which they were seen, that Charles Darnay seemed to stand in a company of the dead. Ghosts all! The ghost of beauty, the ghost of stateliness, the ghost of elegance, the ghost of pride, the ghost of frivolity, the ghost of wit, the ghost of youth, the ghost of age, all waiting their dismissal from the desolate shore, all turning on him eyes that were changed by the death they had died in coming there.

It struck him motionless. The gaoler standing at his side, and the other gaolers moving about, who would have been well enough as to appearance in the ordinary exercise of their functions, looked so extravagantly coarse contrasted with sorrowing mothers and blooming daugh

ters who were there with the apparitions of the coquette, the young beauty, and the mature woman delicately bred -that the inversion of all experience and likelihood which the scene of shadows presented, was heightened to its utmost. Surely ghosts all! Surely the long unreal ride some progress of disease that had brought him to these gloomy shades!

"In the name of the assembled companions in misfortune," said a gentleman of courtly appearance and address, coming forward, “ I have the honour of giving you welcome to La Force, and of condoling with you on the calamity that has brought you amongst 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, you are not in secret ?"

that

"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 conspicuousgave 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 forever.

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.

64

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 out 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 the 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.

TEL

CHAPTER II

THE GRINDSTONE

TELLSON'S BANK, established in the Saint Germain quarter of Paris, was in a wing of a large house, approached by a court-yard and shut off from the street by a high wall and a strong gate. The house belonged to a great nobleman who had lived in it until he made a flight from the troubles, in his own cook's dress, and got across the borders. A mere beast of the chase flying from hunters, he was still in his metempsychosis no other than the same Monseigneur, the preparation of whose chocolate for whose lips had once occupied three strong men besides the cook in question.

Monseigneur gone, and the three strong men absolving themselves from the sin of having drawn his high wages, by being more than ready and willing to cut his throat on the altar of the dawning Republic one and indivisible, of liberty, equality, fraternity, or death, Monseigneur's house had been first sequestrated, and then confiscated. For all things moved so fast, and decree followed decree

with that fierce precipitation, that now upon the third night of the autumn month of September, patriot emissaries of the law were in possession of Monseigneur's house, and had marked it with the tricolour, and were drinking brandy in its state apartments.

A place of business in London like Tellson's place of business in Paris would soon have driven the House out of its mind and into the Gazette. For what would staid British responsibility and respectability have said to orange-trees in boxes in a bank court-yard, and even to a Cupid over the counter? Yet such things were. Tellson's had whitewashed the Cupid, but he was still to be seen on the ceiling, in the coolest linen, aiming (as he very often does) at money from morning to night. Bankruptcy must inevitably have come of this young pagan in Lombard Street, London, and also of a curtained alcove in the rear of the immortal boy, and also of a lookingglass let into the wall, and also of clerks not at all old, who danced in public on the slightest provocation. Yet a French Tellson's could get on with these things exceedingly well, and, as long as the times held together, no man had taken fright at them, and drawn out his money.

What money would be drawn out of Tellson's henceforth, and what would lie there, lost and forgotten; what plate and jewels would tarnish in Tellson's hiding-places, while the depositors rusted in prisons, and when they should have violently perished; how many accounts with Tellson's, never to be balanced in this world, must be carried over into the next; no man could have said that night any more than Mr. Jarvis Lorry could, though he thought heavily of these questions. He sat by a newly、 lighted wood-fire (the blighted and unfruitful year was prematurely cold), and on his honest and courageous face there was a deeper shade than the pendent lamp could