“The channel in the floor through which the water runs when the cell is empty, and the tunnel at the ceiling through which the water flows when the cell is full, give plenty of ventilation, no matter how tightly the door may he closed.  The water rose very gradually until it reached the top outlet, then its level remained stationary.  I floated on the top quite easily, with as little exertion as was necessary to keep me in that position.  If I raised my head, my brow struck the ceiling.  The next cell to mine, lower down, was possibly empty.  I heard the water pour into it like a little cataract.  The next cell above, and indeed all the cells in that direction were flooded like my own.  Of course it was no trouble for me to keep afloat; my only danger was that the intense coldness of the water would numb my body beyond recovery.  Still, I had been accustomed to hardships of that kind before now, in the frozen North.  At last the gentle roar of the waterfall ceased, and I realized my cell was emptying itself.  When I reached my shelf again, I stretched my limbs back and forth as strenuously as I could, and as silently, for I wished no sound to give any hint that I was still alive, if, indeed, sound could penetrate to the passage, which is unlikely.  Even before the last of the water had run away from the cell, I lay stretched out at full length on the floor, hoping I might have steadiness enough to remain death-quiet when the men came in with the lantern.  I need have had no fear.  The door was opened, one of the men picked me up by the heels, and, using my legs as if they were the shafts of a wheelbarrow, dragged me down the passage to the place where the stream emerged from the last cell, and into this torrent he flung me.  There was one swift, brief moment of darkness, then I shot, feet first, into space, and dropped down, down, down through the air like a plummet, into the arms of my mother.”

“Into what?” cried Dorothy, white and breathless, thinking the recital of these agonies had turned the man’s brain.

“The Baltic, Madam, is the Finlander’s mother.  It feeds him in life, carries him whither he wishes to go, and every true Finlander hopes to die in her arms.  The Baltic seemed almost warm after what I had been through, and the taste of the salt on my lips was good.  It was a beautiful starlight night in May, and I floated around the rock, for I knew that in a cove on the eastern side, concealed from all view of the sea, lay a Finland fishing-boat, a craft that will weather any storm, and here in the water was a man who knew how to handle it.  Prisoners are landed on the eastern side, and such advantage is taken of the natural conformation of this precipitous rock, that a man climbing the steep zigzag stairway which leads to the inhabited portion is hidden from sight of any craft upon the water even four or five hundred yards away.  Nothing seen from the outside gives any token of habitation.  The fishing-boat, I suppose, is kept for cases of emergency, that the