and more since then, m'sieu' the dormouse," was his
reply.

I had slept a day and a half since the doors of this cell closed on me.
It was Friday then; now it was Sunday afternoon. Gabord had come to me
three times, and seeing how sound asleep I was had not disturbed me, but
had brought bread and water--my prescribed diet.

He stood there, his feet buried in the blanched corn--I could see the
long yellowish-white blades--the torch throwing shadows about him, his
back against the wall. I looked carefully round my dungeon. There was no
a sign of a window; I was to live in darkness. Yet if I were but allowed
candles, or a lantern, or a torch, some books, paper, pencil, and
tobacco, and the knowledge that I had not killed Juste Duvarney, I
could abide the worst with some sort of calmness. How much might have
happened, must have happened, in all these hours of sleep! My letter to
Alixe should have been delivered long ere this; my trial, no doubt, had
been decided on. What had Voban done? Had he any word for me? Dear Lord!
here was a mass of questions tumbling one upon the other in my head,
while my heart thumped behind my waistcoat like a rubber ball to a
prize-fighter's fist. Misfortunes may be so great and many that one may
find grim humour and grotesqueness in their impossible conjunction and
multiplicity. I remembered at that moment a friend of mine in Virginia,
the most unfortunate man I ever knew. Death, desertion, money losses,
political defeat, flood, came one upon the other all in two years, and
coupled with this was loss of health. One day he said to me:

"Robert, I have a perforated lung, my liver is a swelling sponge, eating
crowds my waistband like a balloon, I have a swimming in my head and
a sinking at my heart, and I can not say litany for happy release from
these for my knees creak with rheumatism. The devil has done his worst,
Robert, for these are his--plague and pestilence, being final, are the
will of God--and, upon my soul, it is an absurd comedy of ills!" At that
he had a fit of coughing, and I gave him a glass of spirits, which eased
him.

"That's better," said I cheerily to him.

"It's robbing Peter to pay Paul," he answered; "for I owed it to my head
to put the quid refert there, and here it's gone to my lungs to hurry
up my breathing. Did you ever think, Robert," he added, "that this
breathing of ours is a labor, and that we have to work every second to
keep ourselves alive? We have to pump a