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was contrived, that walls, and roof, and windows, should thus silently and imperceptibly, without noise, and without motion almost, fold, as it were, within each other, he knew not. He only knew they did so; and he vainly strove to persuade himself it was the intention of the contriver, to rack the miserable wretch who might be immured there, with anticipation, merely, of a fate, from which in the very crisis of his agony, he was to be reprieved.
Gladly would he have clung even to this possibility, if his heart would have let him; hut he felt a dreadful assurance of its fallacy. And what matchless inhumanity it was to doom the sufferer to such ligering torments—to lead him day by day to so appalling a death, unsupported by the consolations of religion, unvisited by any human being, abandoned to himself, deserted ef all, and denied even the sad privilege of knowing that his cruel destiny would awaken pity! Alone he was to perish!—alone he was to wait a slow coming torture, whose most exquisite pangs would be inflicted by that very solitude and that tardy coming!
“It is not death I fear,” he exclaimed, “but the death I mast prepare for! Methinks, too, I could meet even that—all horrible and revolting as it is—if it might overtake me mow. But where shall I find fortitude to tarry till it come! How can I outlive the three long days and nights I have to live?
