l to go! It is an ugly thought that I
should be frightful to my fellow-beings, and that children would cling
to their mothers' gowns at sight of me!"

They shrank back into the dusky passage-way, and closed the door. But,
going up the staircase again, they found the whole interior of the
house tenfold more dismal, and the air closer and heavier, for the
glimpse and breath of freedom which they had just snatched. They could
not flee; their jailer had but left the door ajar in mockery, and stood
behind it to watch them stealing out. At the threshold, they felt his
pitiless gripe upon them. For, what other dungeon is so dark as one's
own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!

But it would be no fair picture of Clifford's state of mind were we to
represent him as continually or prevailingly wretched. On the
contrary, there was no other man in the city, we are bold to affirm, of
so much as half his years, who enjoyed so many lightsome and griefless
moments as himself. He had no burden of care upon him; there were none
of those questions and contingencies with the future to be settled
which wear away all other lives, and render them not worth having by
the very process of providing for their support. In this respect he
was a child,--a child for the whole term of his existence, be it long
or short. Indeed, his life seemed to be standing still at a period
little in advance of childhood, and to cluster all his reminiscences
about that epoch; just as, after the torpor of a heavy blow, the
sufferer's reviving consciousness goes back to a moment considerably
behind the accident that stupefied him. He sometimes told Phoebe and
Hepzibah his dreams, in which he invariably played the part of a child,
or a very young man. So vivid were they, in his relation of them, that
he once held a dispute with his sister as to the particular figure or
print of a chintz morning-dress which he had seen their mother wear, in
the dream of the preceding night. Hepzibah, piquing herself on a
woman's accuracy in such matters, held it to be slightly different from
what Clifford described; but, producing the very gown from an old
trunk, it proved to be identical with his remembrance of it. Had
Clifford, every time that he emerged out of dreams so lifelike,
undergone the torture of transformation from a boy into an old and
broken man, the daily recurrence of the shock would have been too much
to bear. It would have caused an acute ago