rs, to take the
place of those which now diffused a pungent, aromatic odor throughout
the chamber? Ah! what unlikely chances! But if one of these things did
not happen speedily, it had better never happen. How long could he keep
life in himself?

With unaccelerated pulse, he quietly cut the half-burned candle into
four equal parts. "To-night," he meditated, "I will eat the first of
these pieces; to-morrow, the second; to-morrow evening, the third; the
next day, the fourth; and then--then I'll wait!"

He had taken no breakfast that morning, unless a cup of coffee can be
called a breakfast. He had never been very hungry before. He was
ravenously hungry now. But he postponed the meal as long as practicable.
It must have been near midnight, according to his calculation, when he
determined to try the first of his four singular repasts. The bit of
white-wax was tasteless; but it served its purpose.

His appetite for the time appeased, he found a new discomfort. The
humidity of the walls, and the wind that crept through the unseen
ventilator, chilled him to the bone. To keep walking was his only
resource. A sort of drowsiness, too, occasionally came over him. It took
all his will to fight it off. To sleep, he felt, was to die; and he had
made up his mind to live.

Very strange fancies flitted through his head as he groped up and down
the stone floor of the dungeon, feeling his way along the wall to avoid
the sepulchres. Voices that had long been silent spoke words that had
long been forgotten; faces he had known in childhood grew palpable
against the dark. His whole life in detail was unrolled before him like
a panorama; the changes of a year, with its burden of love and death,
its sweets and its bitternesses, were epitomized in a single second. The
desire to sleep had left him. But the keen hunger came again.

It must be near morning now, he mused; perhaps the sun is just gilding
the pinnacles and domes of the city; or, may be, a dull, drizzling rain
is beating on Paris, sobbing on these mounds above me. Paris! it seems
like a dream. Did I ever walk in its gay streets in the golden air? O
the delight and pain and passion of that sweet human life!

Philip became conscious that the gloom, the silence, and the cold were
gradually conquering him. The feverish activity of his brain brought on
a reaction. He grew lethargic, he sunk down on the steps, and thought of
nothing. His hand fell by chance on one of the pieces of cand