, light opening, proclaiming the summit of the
chimney.

Up--up I went, for some time using my hands and knees, after the fashion
of a chimney sweep. It was slow work, but, there being continual
projections, the task was comparatively easy. In this way, I reached
halfway. The chimney now became narrower. The atmosphere was close, and,
at last, to end the matter, I stuck fast. I could ascend no higher.

There could be no doubt of this, and there remained no resource but to
descend, and give up my glorious prey in despair. I yielded to fate and
endeavored to descend. But I could not move. Some unseen and mysterious
obstacle intervened and stopped me. In an instant the full horror of my
situation seized me.

I was unable to move either way, and was doomed to a terrible and
horrible death, that of starvation. In a boy's mind, however, there is
an extraordinary amount of elasticity and hope, and I began to think of
all sorts of plans to escape my gloomy fate.

In the first place, I required no food just at present, having had an
excellent meal, and was therefore allowed time for reflection. My first
thought was to try and move the mortar with my hand. Had I possessed a
knife, something might have been done, but that useful instrument I had
left in my coat pocket.

I soon found that all efforts of this kind were vain and useless, and
that all I could hope to do was to wriggle downwards.

But though I jerked and struggled, and strove to turn, it was all in
vain. I could not move an inch, one way or the other. And time flew
rapidly. My early rising probably contributed to the fact that I felt
sleepy, and gradually gave way to the sensation of drowsiness.

I slept, and awoke in darkness, ravenously hungry.

Night had come, and still I could not move. I was tight bound, and did
not succeed in changing my position an inch. I groaned aloud. Never
since the days of my happy childhood, when it was a hardship to go from
meal to meal without eating, had I really experienced hunger. The
sensation was as novel as it was painful. I began now to lose my head
and to scream and cry out in my agony. Something appeared, startled by
my noise. It was a harmless lizard, but it appeared to me a loathsome
reptile. Again I made the old ruins resound with my cries, and finally
so exhausted myself that I fainted.

How long I lay in a kind of trance or sleep I cannot say, but when again
I recovered consciousness it was day. How ill I felt, ho