s more easy to bear than that which
is caused by man. In the latter case the sense that the misery felt may
be ended by so small a thing as another's will; that another may, by
lifting a finger, cut it short, and will not; that to persuade him is
all that is needful--this becomes at the last maddening, intolerable, a
thing to upset the reason, if that other will not be persuaded.

Colonel John was a man sane and well-balanced, and assuredly not one to
despair lightly. But even he had succumbed more than once during the
last twelve hours to gusts of rage, provoked as much by the futility of
his suffering as by the cruelty of his persecutors. After each of these
storms he had laughed, in wonder at himself, had scolded himself and
grown calm. But they had made their mark upon him, they had left his
eyes wilder, his cheeks more hollow; his hand less firm.

He had burned, in fighting the cold of the past night, all that would
burn, except the chair on which he sat; and with the dawn the last
spark of his fire had died out. Notwithstanding those fits of rage he
was not light-headed. He could command his faculties at will, he could
still reflect and plan, marshal the arguments and perfect the reasons
that must convince his foes, that, if they inflicted a lingering death
on him, they did but work their own undoing. But at times he found
himself confounding the present with the past, fancying, for a while,
that he was in a Turkish prison, and turning, under that impression, to
address Bale; or starting from a waking dream of some cold camp in
Russian snows--alas! starting from it only to shiver with that
penetrating, heart-piercing, frightful cold, which was worse to bear
than the gnawing of hunger or the longing of thirst.

He had not eaten for more than seventy hours. But the long privation
which had weakened his limbs and blanched his cheeks, which had even
gone some way towards disordering his senses, had not availed to shake
his will. The possibility of surrender did not occur to him, partly
because he felt sure that James McMurrough would not be so foolish as
to let him die; but partly, also, by reason of a noble stubbornness in
the man, a fixedness that for no pain of death would leave a woman or a
child to perish. More than once Colonel Sullivan had had to make that
choice, amid the horrors of a retreat across famished lands, with
wolves and Cossacks on his skirts; and perhaps the choice then made had
become a habit of