hung an open cage which was fastened by a chain to a transverse beam.  In the times of the Draconides the Inquisitors of Alca used to put heretical clergy into this cage.  It had been empty for three hundred years, but now Pirot was imprisoned in it under the guard of sixty warders, who lived in the tower and did not lose sight of him night or day, spying on him for confessions that they might afterwards report to the Minister of War.  For Greatauk, careful and prudent, desired confessions and still further confessions.  Greatauk, who was looked upon as a fool, was in reality a man of great ability and full of rare foresight.

In the mean time Pyrot, burnt by the sun, eaten by mosquitoes, soaked in the rain, hail and snow, frozen by the cold, tossed about terribly by the wind, beset by the sinister croaking of the ravens that perched upon his cage, kept writing down his innocence on pieces torn off his shirt with a tooth-pick dipped in blood.  These rags were lost in the sea or fell into the hands of the gaolers.  But Pyrot’s protests moved nobody because his confessions had been published.

III.  COUNT DE MAUBEC DE LA DENTDULYNX

The morals of the Jews were not always pure; in most cases they were averse from none of the vices of Christian civilization, but they retained from the Patriarchal age a recognition of family, ties and an attachment to the interests of the tribe.  Pyrot’s brothers, half-brothers, uncles, great-uncles, first, second, and third cousins, nephews and great-nephews, relations by blood and relations by marriage, and all who were related to him to the number of about seven hundred, were at first overwhelmed by the blow that had struck their relative, and they shut themselves up in their houses, covering themselves with ashes and blessing the hand that had chastised them.  For forty days they kept a strict fast.  Then they bathed themselves and resolved to search, without rest, at the cost of any toil and at the risk of eve danger, for the demonstration of an innocence which they did not doubt.  And how could they have doubted?  Pyrot’s innocence had been revealed to them in the same way that his guilt had been revealed to Christian Penguinia’s; for these things, being hidden, assume a mystic character and take on the authority of religious truths.  The seven hundred Pyrotists set to work with as much zeal as prudence, and made the most thorough inquiries in secret.  They were everywhere; they were seen nowhere.  One would have said that, like the pilot of Ulysses, they wandered freely over the earth.  They penetrated into the War Office and approached, under different disguises, the judges, the registrars, and the witnesses of the affair.  Then Greatauk’s cleverness was seen.  The witnesses knew nothing; the judges and registrars knew nothing.  Emissaries reached even Pyrot and anxiously questioned him in his cage amid the prolonged moanings of the sea and