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Rh native Paris, leaving the Guard Champêtre with Judas and attacks of only occasionally interesting despair.

The reader may suppose that it is about time another Delectable Mountain appeared upon his horizon. Let him keep his eyes wide open, for here one comes....

Whenever our circle was about to be increased, a bell from somewhere afar (as a matter of fact the gate which had admitted my weary self to La Ferté upon a memorable night, as already has been faithfully recounted) tanged audibly—whereat up jumped the more strenuous inhabitants of The Enormous Room and made pell-mell for the common peephole, situated at the door end or nearer end of our habitat and commanding a somewhat fragmentary view of the gate together with the arrivals, male and female, whom the bell announced. In one particular case the watchers appeared almost unduly excited, shouting "four!"—"big box"—"five gendarmes!" and other incoherences with a loudness which predicted great things. As nearly always, I had declined to participate in the mêlée; and was still lying comfortably horizontal on my bed (thanking God that it had been well and thoroughly mended by a fellow prisoner whom we called The Frog and Le Coiffeur—a tremendously keen-eyed man with a large drooping moustache, whose boon companion, chiefly on account of his shape and gait, we knew as The Lobster) when the usual noises attendant upon the unlocking of the door began with exceptional violence. I sat up. The door shot open, there was a moment's pause, a series of grunting remarks uttered by two rather terrible voices; then in came four nouveaux of a decidedly interesting appearance. They entered in two ranks of two each. The front rank was made up of an immensely broad shouldered hipless and consequently triangular man in blue trousers belted with a piece of ordinary rope, plus a thick-set ruffianly personage the most prominent part of whose accoutrements were a pair of hideous whiskers. I leaped to my feet and made for the door, thrilled in spite of myself. By the, in this case, shifty blue eyes, the pallid hair, the well-knit form of the rope's owner I knew instantly a Hollander. By the coarse