The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 157: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

126 THE COURT OF LONDON labours after the evening meal of coffee and bread had been served to them. For four hours longer did they continue to work by turns, though not without grazing the skin off their hands against the asperities of the orifice which they were forming, and receiving frequent bruises on the knuckles by the slipping of the file; for it was by no means an easy task thus to toil on in the unrelieved darkness of that place. At length the perforation was complete; and Page, thrusting his arm through the aperture, placed beyond all further doubt the fact that there was a cellar on the other side of the wall. The removal of the last few stones, the displacement of which was necessary to render the hole large enough for the passage of a human form, was now speedily effected; and ere midnight the old rusty file and the hands which wielded it by turns had done their duty. Up to this moment the baronet had scarcely been able to bring himself to believe that escape from the dungeon was really within the range of probability. He had laboured on in that same spirit of desperation which prompts the drowning man to clutch at a straw; and now that he heard himself called upon by his companion to follow through the aperture, he was as much bewildered with mingled hope and fear as that same perishing wretch might be supposed to feel when awakening on the bank to which some succouring hand had drawn him. Unhesitatingly did Page introduce himself, legs foremost, into the large opening made in the wall; but before the baro- net attempted the passage, the commercial traveller ascer- tained, to the ineffable joy of both, that the door of the cellar into which he had thus entered was not locked. In- spired by this assurance, Sir Richard Stamford followed his leader; and now they paused for a few minutes to gain breath and deliberate upon the course to be adopted. The decision to which they came was indeed the only alternative that the circumstances offered; namely, to steal up into the house as gently as possible, and risk all the rest. It might be that they would succeed in escaping stealthily forth into the street; it might also happen that they would be overheard by the inmates, and in this latter case they must prepare to resort to means of either persuasion or CORnnicloo®