lean one--still worse of him who spends his night _dos a
dos_ to an oak in a forest, cold, chill, and comfortless; no property
in his limbs beneath the knees, where all sensation terminates, and his
hands as benumbed as the heart of a poor-law guardian!

If I have never, in all my after-life, seen the sun rise from the
Rigi, from Snowdon, or the Pic du Midi, or any other place which seems
especially made for this sole purpose, I owe it to the experience of
this night, and am grateful therefore. Not that I have the most remote
notion of throwing disrespect on the glorious luminary, far from it--I
cut one of my oldest friends for speaking lightly of the equator; but
I hold it that the sun looks best, as every one else does, when he's up
and dressed for the day. It's a piece of prying, impertinent curiosity
to peep at him when he 's rising and at his toilette; he has not rubbed
the clouds out of his eyes, or you dared not look at him--and you
feel it too. The very way you steal out to catch a glimpse shows the
sneaking, contemptible sense you have of your own act. Peeping Tom was a
gentleman compared to your early riser.

The whole of which digression simply seems to say that I by no means
enjoyed the rosy-fingered morning's blushes the more for having spent
the preceding night in the open air. I need not worry myself, still less
my reader, by recapitulating the various frames of mind which succeeded
each other every hour of my captivity. At one time my escape with life
served to console me for all I endured; at another, my bondage excited
my whole wrath. I vowed vengeance on my persecutors too, and meditated
various schemes for their punishment--my anger rising as their absence
was prolonged, till I thought I could calculate my indignation by an
algebraical formula, and make it exactly equal to the 'squares of the
distance' of my persecutors. Then I thought of the delight I should
experience in regaining my freedom, and actually made a bold effort to
see something ludicrous in the entire adventure: but no--it would not
do; I could not summon up a laugh.

At last--it might have been towards noon--I heard a merry voice chanting
a song, and a quick step coming up the _allee_ of the wood. Never did my
heart beat with such delight! The very mode of progression had something
joyous in it; it seemed a hop and a step and a spring, suiting each
motion to the tune of the air--when suddenly the singer, with a long
bound, stood be