good
heart' sentence, for I'd see how it is written--how GABORD looks with a
woman's whimsies round it."

I traced the words with my fingers, holding the letter near the torch.
"'Yet he will not be rougher than his orders,'" said he after me, and
"'He did me a good service once.'"

"Comfits," he continued; "well, thou shalt have comfits, too," and he
fished from his pocket a parcel. It was my tobacco and my pipe.

Truly, my state might have been vastly worse. Little more was said
between Gabord and myself, but he refused bluntly to carry message or
letter to anybody, and bade me not to vex him with petitions. But he
left me the torch and a flint and steel, so I had light for a space, and
I had my blessed tobacco and pipe. When the doors clanged shut and the
bolts were shot, I lay back on my couch.

I was not all unhappy. Thank God, they had not put chains on me, as
Governor Dinwiddie had done with a French prisoner at Williamsburg, for
whom I had vainly sought to be exchanged two years before, though he was
my equal in all ways and importance. Doltaire was the cause of that,
as you shall know. Well, there was one more item to add to his
indebtedness. My face flushed and my fingers tingled at thought of him,
and so I resolutely turned my meditations elsewhere, and again in a
little while I seemed to think of nothing, but lay and bathed in the
silence, and indulged my eyes with the good red light of the torch,
inhaling its pitchy scent. I was conscious, yet for a time I had no
thought: I was like something half animal, half vegetable, which feeds,
yet has no mouth, nor sees, nor hears, nor has sense, but only lives.
I seemed hung in space, as one feels when going from sleep to waking--a
long lane of half-numb life, before the open road of full consciousness
is reached.

At last I was aroused by the sudden cracking of a knot in the torch. I
saw that it would last but a few hours more. I determined to put it out,
for I might be allowed no more light, and even a few minutes of this
torch every day would be a great boon. So I took it from its place, and
was about to quench it in the moist earth at the foot of the wall, when
I remembered my tobacco and my pipe. Can you think how joyfully I packed
full the good brown bowl, delicately filling in every little corner, and
at last held it to the flame, and saw it light? That first long whiff
was like the indrawn breath of the cold, starved hunter, when, stepping
into his hous