bespoke not lack of bodily strength. A shock of
yellow hair, mixed liberally with grey, stood out from beneath his cap
of steel, like a wisp of straw.

After placing the articles that he had brought, upon the floor, he cast
but one glance at me, and then turned on his heel and left me.
Presently he returned with my supper, which he placed upon the table
much in the same manner as one would arrange the meal of swine.

"There, sir," said he, "thou hast nothing to complain of. That supper
is fit for a King. And it's better than one King had whilst he lived
in this very room."

"What! did the young King Edward occupy this room?"

"As for whether he occupied it or not, now that I know not; but he was
kept in this same room until he went out feet first."

"Horrible!" I gasped.

"Horrible? Lord, sir! methinks that thou shouldst feel honoured by the
thought of being let sleep in the same room where a royal King did
sleep. I know that I would," he added, with a grim smile.

"And dost thou know who killed him?" I asked.

"Nay, nay, I said not nothing of his being killed," he replied, with a
grin and a wise twist of his head, accompanied by the uplifting of the
one of his shoulders until it touched his ear.

"Well then, of what distemper did he die?"

"Ha, ha!" he laughed, as though I had amused him vastly. "What
distemper? Ha, ha, ha! Well upon my soul! ha, ha, ha!" he burst forth
again.

His voice, when he laughed, was ample evidence that he had in his day
consumed no small quantity of spirits of different sorts; for it
sounded as though a goodly quantity of the liquids had remained in his
throat, where it did some prodigious bubbling.

"The distempers that one gets when a prisoner here are most always of
one kind. Ha, ha, ha! What distemper? Well upon my soul!" And still
laughing at that which he no doubt imagined was wit, he went out and
locked the door and I was again alone with my thoughts, which were no
more cheerful than they had been previous to his visit.

That night my sleep, if such it may be called, was an almost endless
succession of tormenting and extravagant dreams of terror, divided from
each other by an awakening start of horror.

And so the weary days and nights of mine imprisonment dragged slowly
on. Slowly, for the weight of sorrow and tormenting agony of
uncertainty for the fate of the one I loved did impede their progress,
as doth the heavy weight upon the poor snail's back cau