“He will think,” merrily replied the Jolly-cum-pop, “that all your prisoners are very fat, and that the little girls have grown up into big men.”

“I will endeavor to explain that,” said the jailer.

For several days the Jolly-cum-pop was highly amused at the idea of his being seventeen criminals, and he would sit first in one cell and then in another, trying to look like a ferocious pirate, a hard-hearted usurer, or a mean-spirited chicken thief, and laughing heartily at his failures.  But, after a time, he began to tire of this, and to have a strong desire to see what sort of a tunnel the Prince’s miners and rock-splitters were making under his house.  “I had hoped,” he said to himself, “that I should pine away in confinement, and so be able to get through the window-bars; but with nothing to do, and seventeen rations a day, I see no chance of that.  But I must get out of this jail, and, as there seems no other way, I will revolt.”  Thereupon he shouted to the jailer through the hole in the door of his cell:  “We have revolted!  We have risen in a body, and have determined to resist your authority, and break jail!”

When the jailer heard this, he was greatly troubled.  “Do not proceed to violence,” he said; “let us parley.”

“Very well,” replied the Jolly-cum-pop, “but you must open the cell door.  We cannot parley through a hole.”

The jailer thereupon opened the cell door, and the Jolly-cum-pop, having wrapped sixteen suits of clothes around his left arm as a shield, and holding in his right hand the iron bar which had been cut from his window, stepped boldly into the corridor, and confronted the jailer and his myrmidons.

“It will be useless for you to resist,” he said.  “You are but four, and we are seventeen.  If you had been wise you would have made us all cheating shop-keepers, chicken thieves, or usurers.  Then you might have been able to control us; but when you see before you a desperate highwayman, a daring smuggler, a blood-thirsty pirate, a wily poacher, a powerful ruffian, a reckless burglar, a bold conspirator, and a murderer by proxy, you well may tremble!”

The jailer and his myrmidons looked at each other in dismay.

“We sigh for no blood,” continued the Jolly-cum-pop, “and will readily agree to terms.  We will give you your choice:  Will you allow us to honorably surrender, and peacefully disperse to our homes, or shall we rush upon you in a body, and, after overpowering you by numbers, set fire to the jail, and escape through the crackling timbers of the burning pile?”

The jailer reflected for a minute.  “It would be better, perhaps,” he said, “that you should surrender and disperse to your homes.”