gymnastics; a minute wooden shed filled the right upper corner and served
secondarily as a very partial shelter for the men and primarily as a
stable for an extraordinary water-wagon, composed of a wooden barrel on
two wheels with shafts which would not possibly accommodate anything
larger than a diminutive donkey (but in which I myself was to walk not
infrequently, as it proved); parallel to the second stone wall, but at a
safe distance from it, stretched a couple of iron girders serving as a
barbarously cold seat for any unfortunate who could not remain on his
feet the entire time; on the ground close by the shed lay amusement
devices numbers two and three--a huge iron cannon-ball and the six-foot
iron axle of a departed wagon--for testing the strength of the prisoners
and beguiling any time which might lie heavily on their hands after they
had regaled themselves with the horizontal bar; and finally, a dozen
mangy apple-trees, fighting for their very lives in the angry soil,
proclaimed to all the world that the _cour_ itself was in reality a
_verger_.

"Les pommiers sont pleins de pommes;
Allons au verger, Simone...."

A description of the _cour_ would be incomplete without an enumeration of
the manifold duties of the _planton_ in charge, which were as follows: to
prevent the men from using the horizontal bar, except for chinning, since
if you swung yourself upon it you could look over the wall into the
women's _cour_; to see that no one threw anything over the wall into said
_cour_; to dodge the cannon-ball which had a mysterious habit of taking
advantage of the slope of the ground and bounding along at a prodigious
rate of speed straight for the sentry-box; to watch closely anyone who
inhabited the _cabinet d'aisance_, lest he should make use of it to vault
over the wall; to see that no one stood on the girders, for a similar