Page 28 (1/1)

He thought a moment

"Ah! In the baseine-roo of that sort There's sure to be tools in a place like that" And, laying off the bear-skin, he prepared to explore the regions under the ground-level

He used h devious ways and hard labor, to make his way to the desired spot The ancient stair-way, leading down, he could not find

But by claers into the crevices in the ed at last to reach a vaulted sub-cellar, festooned ebs, dalih a gaping, jagged hole near one end of the cellar, beneath which lay a badly-broken stone

The engineer figured that this block had fallen from the tower and come to rest only here; and this awoke him to a new sense of ever-present peril At any ht or day, he realized, soilance!" he whispered to hi useless fears, he set about the task in hand

By the dinizance of theplace, which, on the whole, was in a better state of repair than the arcade The first cellar yielded nothing of value to hih a low vaulted door, he chanced into what ine-rooms

This, he found, contained a battery of four dynastill coht of all this valuable machinery scaled and pitted with rust, Stern's brows contracted with a feeling akin to pain The engineer loved mechanism of all sorts; its care and use had been his life

And now these e as that ly than the little heaps of dust which s had fallen in sudden, inescapable death

Yet even so, he had no ti about the dimwit vault "Tools--I must have soht, he discovered no ax in the place, but in place of it he unearthed a sledge-hah corroded, it was still quite serviceable Oddly enough, the oak handle was almost intact

"Kyanized wood, probably," reflected he, as he laid the sledge to one side and began delving into a bed of dust that had evidently been a work-bench "Ah! And here's a chisel! A spanner, too! A heap of rusty old wire nails!"