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Updated: June 26, 2025
Three of the six pigwidgeons were workers in iron, and they had their little files and saws in pouches by their sides. They went to work manfully, and the others helped them, and before morning one bar was cut in each of the seventeen windows. The cells were all on the ground floor, and it was quite easy for the prisoners to clamber out. That is, it was easy for all but the Jolly-cum-pop.
When the prince and the courtiers saw the Jolly-cum-pop in his bright and variegated dress, they did not know him; but the boys and girls soon recognized his jovial face, and, tired as they were, they set up a hearty laugh, in which they were loudly joined by their merry friend.
"Who are you all?" asked the Jolly-cum-pop, looking with much surprise at the jailer's companions, who were now quite near. "We are myself, my three myrmidons, and our wives and children. Our situations were such good ones that we married long ago, and our families lived in the upper stories of the prison.
But when he had gone several miles without seeing any signs of his habitation, his gayety abated. "It would have been much better," he said, as he sat down to rest under the shade of a tree, "if I had brought with me sixteen rations instead of these sixteen suits of clothes." The Jolly-cum-pop soon set out again, but he walked a long distance without seeing any person or any house.
While the Jolly-cum-pop was listening to the adventures of the Prince and his companions, and telling what had happened to himself, the man with the red beard was talking to the jailer and his party, and urging them to gather around the nucleus which had been here formed, and help to build a city.
The jailer thereupon opened the cell door, and the Jolly-cum-pop, having wrapped sixteen suits of clothes around his left arm as a shield, and holding in his right hand the iron bar which had been cut from his window, stepped boldly into the corridor, and confronted the jailer and his myrmidons. "It will be useless for you to resist," he said. "You are but four, and we are seventeen.
The Jolly-cum-pop, however, was affected in a different way. It seemed to him the most amusing joke in the world that a person should deliberately walk into a prison-cell and be locked up for several years; and he lay down on his little bed and laughed himself to sleep. That night one of the boys sat at his iron-barred window, wide awake.
"It would be better, perhaps," he said, "that you should surrender and disperse to your homes." The Jolly-cum-pop agreed to these terms, and the great gate being opened, he marched out in good order. "Now," said he to himself, "the thing for me to do is to get home as fast as I can, or that jailer may change his mind."
I wrote a report, which I fastened to the great gate, and in it I stated that sixteen of the convicts escaped by the aid of outside confederates, and that seventeen of them mutinied in a body and broke jail." "That report," laughed the Jolly-cum-pop, "your Potentate will not readily understand."
"If the Potentate comes here and wants to look at the prisoners," he said to the Jolly-cum-pop, "you must appear in cell number One, so that he can look through the hole in the door, and see you; then, as he walks along the corridor, you must walk through the cells, and whenever he looks into a cell, you must be there."
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