that made them waterproof, were unfastened and placed on horses, which immediately dashed off for the interior of the country.  A second cargo arrived with the same success; but as we were landing the third, some reports of fire-arms announced that our outposts were attacked.  “There is the beginning of the ball,” said Peters, calmly; “I must go and see who will dance;” and taking up his carbine, he joined the outposts, which had by this time joined each other.  The firing became rapid, and we had two men killed, and others slightly wounded.  At the fire of the revenue officers, we soon found that they exceeded us in number; but alarmed, and fearing an ambuscade, they dared not to approach, and we effected our retreat without any attempt on their part to prevent it.  From the beginning of the fight the Squirrel had weighed anchor and stood out to sea, for fear that the noise of the firing should bring down on her the government cruiser.  I was told that most probably she would unload her cargo in some other part of the coast, where the owners had numerous agents.

[Vidocq returns to Lille, where he is taken by two gendarmes, and concerts the following stratagem for escape:—­]

This escape, however, was not so very easy a matter as may be surmised, when I say that our dungeons, seven feet square, had walls six feet thick, strengthened with planking crossed and rivetted with iron; a window, two feet by one, closed with three iron gratings placed one after the other, and the door cased with wrought iron.  With such precautions, a jailor might depend on the safe keeping of his charge, but yet we overcame it all.

I was in a cell on the second floor with Duhamel.  For six francs, a prisoner, who was also a turnkey, procured us two files, a ripping chisel, and two turnscrews.  We had pewter spoons, and our jailor was probably ignorant of the use which prisoners could make of them.  I knew the dungeon key; it was the counterpart of all the others on the same story; and I cut a model of it from a large carrot; then I made a mould with crumb of bread and potatoes.  We wanted fire, and we procured it by making a lamp with a piece of fat and the rags of a cotton cap.  The key was at last made of pewter, but it was not yet perfect; and it was only after many trials and various alterations that it fitted at last.  Thus masters of the doors, we were compelled to work a hole in the wall, near the barns of the town-hall.  Sallambier, who was in the dungeons below, found a way to cut the hole, by working through the planking.

THE PRISON OF BICETRE AT PARIS.