dition of deep sleep to one of wakefulness as though he had never
shut his eyes. He used to say afterwards that he felt as though
somebody had come and aroused him; it was not like a natural waking.
Indeed, so unaccustomed was the sensation, that for a moment the idea
flashed through his brain that he had died in his sleep, and was now
awakening to a new state of existence.

This soon passed, however. Evidently he must have slept some time, for
the lamp was out and the fire dying. He got up and hunted about in the
dark for some matches, which at last he found. He struck a light,
standing exactly opposite to the bit of paper with the copy of Sir
James de la Molle's dying message on it. This message was neatly
copied long-ways upon a half-sheet of large writing paper, such as the
Squire generally used. It's first line ran as it was copied:

"/Do not grieve for me, Edward, my son, that I am thus suddenly and
wickedly done./"

Now, as the match burnt up, by some curious chance, connected probably
with the darkness and the sudden striking of light upon his eyeballs,
it came to pass that Harold, happening to glance thereon, was only
able to read four letters of this first line of writing. All the rest
seemed to him but as a blue connecting those four letters. They were:

D...............E...............a...............d

being respectively the initials of the first, the sixth, the eleventh,
and the sixteenth words of the line given above.

The match burnt out, and he began to hunt about for another.

"D-E-A-D," he said aloud, repeating the letters almost automatically.
"Why it spells '/Dead/.' That is rather curious."

Something about this accidental spelling awakened his interest very
sharply--it was an odd coincidence. He lit some candles, and hurriedly
examined the line. The first thing which struck him was that the four
letters which went to make up the word "dead" were about equi-distant
in the line of writing. Could it be? He hurriedly counted the words in
the line. There were sixteen of them. That is after the first, one of
the letters occurred at the commencement of every fifth word.

This was certainly curious. Trembling with nervousness he took a
pencil and wrote down the initial letter of every fifth word in the
message, thus:

Do not grieve for me, Edward my son, that I am thus suddenly and
D E a

wickedly done to death by rebel murderers, for n