“Well, the men on the night watch lit a fire in this very grate and began chatting together close to it.  Soon the bricks which had not bricks but wood underneath them got loose, and nearly fell out of their places as the wood gave way.  On noticing this and probing the place with a stick, they found that the bottom was made of wood, whereupon they remarked that this was something curious.  I thought that they were going there and then to break open the place and enter, but they made up their minds at last to put off further examination till next day.

“Next morning, therefore, they renewed the search most carefully, everywhere except in the top chamber which served as a chapel, and in which the two watchmen had made a fire over my head and had noticed the strange make of the grate.  God had blotted out of their memory all remembrance of the thing.  Nay, none of the searchers entered the place the whole day, though it was the one that was most open to suspicion, and if they had entered, they would have found me without any search; rather, I should say, they would have seen me, for the fire had burnt a great hole in my hiding-place, and had I not got a little out of the way, the hot embers would have fallen on me.

“The searchers, forgetting or not caring about this room, busied themselves in ransacking the rooms below, in one of which I was said to be.  In fact, they found the other hiding-place which I thought of going into, as I mentioned before.  It was not far off, so I could hear their shouts of joy when they first found it.  But after joy comes grief; and so it was with them.  The only thing that they found was a goodly store of provision laid up.  Hence they may have thought that this was the place that the mistress of the house meant; in fact, an answer might have been given from it to the call of a person in the room mentioned by her.

“They stuck to their purpose, however, of stripping off all the wainscot of the other large room.  So they set a man to work near the ceiling, close to the place where I was:  for the lower part of the walls was covered with tapestry, not with wainscot.  So they stripped off the wainscot all round till they came again to the very place where I lay, and there they lost heart and gave up the search.

“My hiding-place was in a thick wall of the chimney behind a finely inlaid and carved mantelpiece.  They could not well take the carving down without risk of breaking it.  Broken, however, it would have been, and that into a thousand pieces, had they any conception that I could be concealed behind it.  But knowing that there were two flues, they did not think that there could be room enough there for a man.

“Nay, before this, on the second day of the search, they had gone into the room above, and tried the fireplace through which I had got into my hole.  They then got into the chimney by a ladder to sound with their hammers.  One said to another in my hearing, ’Might there not be a place here for a person to get down into the wall of the chimney below by lifting up this hearth?’ ‘No,’ answered one of the pursuivants, whose voice I knew, ’you could not get down that way into the chimney underneath, but there might easily be an entrance at the back of this chimney.’  So saying he gave the place a knock.  I was afraid that he would hear the hollow sound of the hole where I was.