Page:Adventures of Baron Wenceslas Wratislaw of Mitrowitz (1862).djvu/204

 like a cage in which lions are kept, so conveniently constructed that the guards can walk inside round the lattice, within which the prisoners sit, and see what they are doing. In the middle of this cage burns, day and night, a glass lamp, and round are stumps, or blocks, on which we supported our feet. We were, indeed, to have had our feet fastened in these blocks, but, as it pleased God to grant us to find favour in the eyes of the governor, he did not put us into the blocks, except when Turks whom he did not know were to come to the tower, when he sent guards in first with orders to put both our feet into the blocks and fasten us in. On the departure of the Turks he used to order us to be let out again.

This governor had been a Christian child, born in Croatia, and was then more than ninety years old; zealous in his religion, and compassionate towards us, but careful in his duties. He looked to the guards himself, came frequently into the tower, and had the fetters examined every day. Every week the guards examined all our clothes over the whole body, to see whether they could find a knife or file on any one, and, taking warning from the aga who had been hung, he did not allow his diligence to relax in the least. Accordingly, the next morning he ordered us all to be led one after the other out of the tower, and large iron fetters to be clinched on the feet of each, and then bade us return to the tower. The Lord God then raised up for me a good friend among the guards, a Croatian renegade, who advised me to go out of the tower last. When all my comrades had been provided with fetters on their feet, and had returned to the tower, I was conducted before the aga and his councillors, just