rope beside the right, and he had taken
a long breath of,--was it relief? Relief from uncertainty, at least. He
knew with a positive knowledge that there was but one outcome for the
situation. It would be an hour at the very least before his friends
reached the tunnel, for Discombe had business to attend to on the way.
Even then they might not conclude immediately that anything was amiss.
The break in the rope must be recent. It was possible that no one in the
mine had discovered it. The old shaft was never used now-a-days, except
for just such chance excursions as his. One thing was sure,--he could
never hold out an hour. Already his wrists were weakening; he was
getting chilled too, now that motion had ceased. He gave himself twenty
minutes at the most, and then?--Hm! He wondered what it would be like!
He had heard that people falling from a great height had the breath
knocked out of them before they--arrived! He was afraid three hundred
feet was not high enough for that! What a pity the shaft was not a
thousand feet deep! What a pity it had any bottom at all!

"I should have liked a chance to tell Louisa," he said aloud, with a
short, nervous laugh, and then,--he was himself again.

To say that Mr. Fetherbee was himself again is to say that he was a
self-possessed and plucky little gentleman,--the same gallant little
gentleman, dangling here at the end of a rope, with the steady,
irresistible force of gravitation pulling him to his doom, as he had
ever been in his gay, debonair progress through a safe and friendly
world. He forced his thoughts away from the horror to come. His
imagination could be kept out of that yawning horror, though his body
must be inevitably drawn down into it as by a thousand clutching hands.
He forced his thoughts back to the pleasant, prosperous life he had led;
to the agreeable people he had known; and most tenderly, most warmly, he
thought of Louisa,--Louisa, so kind, so sympathetic, so companionable.

"Louisa," he had said to her one day, "I not only love you, but I like
you." Well, so it had been with his life, that pleasant life of his. He
not only loved it but he liked it! As he looked back over its course, in
a spirit of calm contemplation, the achievement of which he did not
consider in the least heroic, he came to the deliberate conclusion that
he had had his share. After a little more consideration his mind, with
but a quickly suppressed recoil, adopted the conviction that it was