QUEER HIDING PLACES

Evening Star, Issue 11656, 17 September 1901, Page 3

QUEER HIDING PLACES

Three days in a chimney is sorely a good price to pay for freedom, but a prisoner at Guildford (England) has paid the price and lost his freedom still. He -was less fortunate than some prisoners have been. One of the most romantic stories of prison life is of the man who allowed himself to be built up inside a chimney at Portland, escaping in the night by forcing down the newly-built masonry. There was oDce a similar escape from Chatham convict prison. The convicts were piling up a stack of bricks when one of them threw himself full length on the ground and allowed his comrades to cover him up. He was missed, but nobody guessed his hiding place, and when the search bad been given up for the night the man received the reward of his daring by getting clear away. None of these voluntary incarcerations, however, were- quite so uncomfortable as must have been that of the prisoner at Portland who conceived the notion of allowing himself to be buried underground by his fellow-prisoners. His plucky bid for liberty was not rewarded. How he meant to escape from the Island is not quite clear, but he was not given the opportunitv of carrying his ' drama beyond the first" act. Believing it impossible that a man could have escaped from the island, some of the search party began prodding the ground with their bayonets and at last tj-,re came a cry from underneath which brought the man's strange hiding place to light. Hiding places are common enough in tha country homes of England, and they abound in the stories of conspiracies. The Guildford prisoner seems to have been driven to reveal himself by hunger. The lack of food has always been the great drawback to dwelling in chimneys and walls. One of the priests in the Gunpowder Plot was within an aco of starving to death in a wall when his friends succeeded in rescuing him, and there is no doubt that criminals have again and again died of hunger in secret fastnesses from which they had no means of communicating with the world. Such strange hiding places are not always voluntary. There was a pathetic tragedy not many years ago at Nottingham which recalls the famous story of Genevra. A little girl was suddenly missed from her home, and for days the mystery of her disappearance baffled her parents and the police. At the end of the fourth day, when all hope had been abandoned, it was noticed that an old grandfather's clock in a lumber room had fallen from its place, and, quite carelessly, a member of the housed hold stooped to raise it. Underneath was the missing child. Hiding herself in the. clock, she had caused it to fall from its place, and had boon imprisoned by its falling. Four days of hunger and 'cold had left her. all but lifeless, and the child was restored to her friends only to pass away in a few hours.