promise bloodshed, held by Defarge’s arm as he held by the

turnkey’s. Their three heads had been close together during this

brief discourse, and it had been as much as they could do to hear

one another, even then: so tremendous was the noise of the living

ocean, in its irruption into the Fortress, and its inundation of the

courts and passages and staircases. All around outside, too, it beat

the walls with a deep, hoarse roar, from which, occasionally, some

partial shouts of tumult broke and leaped into the air like spray.

Through gloomy vaults where the light of day had never shone,

past hideous doors of dark dens and cages, down cavernous flights

of steps, and again up steep rugged ascents of stone and brick,

more like dry waterfalls than staircases, Defarge, the turnkey, and

Jacques Three, linked hand and arm, went with all the speed they

could make. Here and there, especially at first, the inundation

started on them and swept by; but when they had done

descending, and were winding and climbing up a tower, they were

alone. Hemmed in here by the massive thickness of walls and

arches, the storm within the fortress and without was only audible

to them in a dull, subdued way, as if the noise out of which they

had come had almost destroyed their sense of hearing.

The turnkey stopped at a low door, put a key in a clashing lock,

swung the door slowly open, and said, as they all bent their heads

and passed in“One Hundred and Five, North Tower!”

There was a small, heavily-grated, unglazed window high in the

wall, with a stone screen before it, so that the sky could be only

seen by stooping low and looking up. There was a small chimney,

heavily barred across, a few feet within. There was a heap of old

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feathery wood-ashes on the hearth. There was a stool, and table,

and a straw bed. There were the four blackened walls, and a

rusted iron ring in one of them.

“Pass that torch slowly along these walls, that I may see them,”

said Defarge to the turnkey.

“Stop!Look here, Jacques!”

“A. M.!” creaked Jacques Three, as he read greedily.

“Alexandre Manette,” said Defarge in his ear, following the

letters with his swart forefinger, deeply engrained with

gunpowder. “And here he wrote ‘a poor physician.’ And it was he,

without doubt, who scratched a calendar on this stone. What is

that in your hand? A crowbar? Give it me!”

He had still the linstock of his gun in his own hand. He made a

sudden exchange of the two instruments, and turning on the

worm-eaten stool and table, beat them to pieces in a few blows.

“Hold the light higher!” he said, wrathfully, to the turnkey.

“Look among those fragments with care, Jacques. And see! Here

is my knife,” throwing it to him; “rip open that bed, and search the

straw. Hold the light higher, you!”

With a menacing look at the turnkey he crawled upon the

hearth, and, peering up the chimney, struck and prised at its sides

with the crowbar, and worked at the iron grating across it. In a few