“The cells hewn in the rock are completely dark, so I lost all count of time.  You might think we would know night from day by the bringing in of our meals, but such was not the case.  The gaoler brought in a large loaf of black bread, and said it was to serve me for four days.  He placed the loaf on a ledge of rock about three feet from the floor, which served as both table and bed.  In excavating the cell this ledge had been left intact, with a bench of stone rising from the floor opposite.  Indeed, so ingenious had been the workmen who hewed out this room that they carved a rounded stone pillow at one end of the shelf.

“I do not know how many days I had been in prison when the explosion occurred.  It made the whole rock quiver, and I wondered what had happened.  Almost immediately afterward there seemed to be another explosion, not nearly so harsh, which I thought was perhaps an echo of the first.  About an hour later my cell door was unlocked, and the gaoler, with another man holding a lantern, came in.  My third loaf of black bread was partly consumed, so I must have been in prison nine or ten days.  The gaoler took the loaf outside, and when he returned.  I asked him what had happened.  He answered in a surly fashion that my American warship had fired at the rock, and that the rock had struck back, whereupon she sailed away, crippled.”

Dorothy, who had been listening intently to this discourse, here interrupted with: 

“It was an English war-ship that fired the shell, and the Russian shot did not come within half a mile of her.”

The sailor stared at her in wide-eyed surprise.

“You see, I have been making inquiries,” she explained.  “Please go on.”

“I never heard that it was an English ship.  The gaoler sneered at me, and said he was going to send me after the American vessel, as I suppose he thought it was.  I feared by his taking away of the bread that it was intended to starve me to death, and was sorry I had not eaten more at my last meal.  I lay down on the shelf of rock, and soon fell asleep.  I was awakened by the water lapping around me.  The cell was intensely still.  Up to this I had always enjoyed the company of a little brook that ran along the side of the cell farthest from the door.  Its music had now ceased, and when I sprang up I found myself to the waist in very cold water.  I guessed at once the use of the levers outside the cell in the passage which I had noticed in the light of the lantern on the day I entered the place, and I knew now why it was that the prison door was not pierced by one of those gratings which enable the gaoler in the passage to look into the cell any time of night or day.  Prisoners have told me that the uncertainty of an inmate who never knew when he might be spied upon added to the horror of the situation, but the water-tight doors of the Trogzmondoff are free from this feature, and for a very sinister reason.