Page:Dickens - A Child s History of England, 1900.djvu/334

316 great ardor. But, the wall being tremendously thick and the work very severe, they took into their plot,, a younger brother of John Wright, that they might have a new pair of hands to help. And Christopher Wright fell to like a fresh man, and they dug and dug by night and by day, and Fawkes stood sentinel all the time. And if any man's heart seemed to fail him at all, Fawkes said, "Gentlemen, we have abundance of powder and shot here, and there is no fear of our being taken alive, even if discovered." The same Fawkes, who, in the capacity of sentinel, was always prowling about, soon picked up the intelligence that the King had prorogued the Parliament again, from the seventh of February, the day first fixed upon, until the third of October. When the conspirators knew this, they agreed to separate until after the Christmas holidays, and to take no notice of each other in the mean while, and never to write letters to one another on any account. So, the house in Westminster was shut up again, and I suppose the neighbors thought that those strange-looking men who lived there so gloomily, and went out so seldom, were gone away to have a merry Christmas somewhere.

It was the beginning of February, sixteen hundred and five, when Catesby met his fellow-conspirators again at this Westminster house. He had now admitted three more;, a Warwickshire gentleman of a melancholy temper who lived in a doleful house near Stratford-upon-Avon, with a frowning wall all round it, and a deep moat; , eldest brother of Thomas; and Catesby's own servant, , who, Catesby thought, had had some suspicion of what his master was about. These three had all suffered more or less for their religion in Elizabeth's time. And now, they all began to dig again, and they dug and dug by night and by day.

They found it dismal work alone there, underground, with such a fearful secret on their minds, and so many murders before them. They were filled with wild fancies. Sometimes, they thought they heard a great bell tolling, deep down in the earth under the Parliament House; sometimes, they thought they heard low voices muttering about the Gunpowder Plot; once in the morning, they really did hear a great rumbling noise over their