n deadly peril; as
I live now, I distinctly heard the bells of Trinity chiming midnight, as
I rose to the surface the next instant, immersed in the stone caldron,
where I must swim for my life Heaven only could tell how long!

"I am a capital swimmer; and this naturally gave me a degree of
self-possession. Falling as I had, I of course had pitched out some
distance from the sloping parapet. A few strokes brought me to the edge.
I really was not yet certain but that I could clamber up the face of the
wall anywhere. I hoped that I could. I felt certain at least there
was some spot where I might get hold with my hands, even if I did not
ultimately ascend it.

"I tried the nearest spot. The inclination of the wall was so vertical
that it did not even rest me to lean against it. I felt with my hands
and with my feet. Surely, I thought, there must be some fissure like
those in which that ill-omened weed had found a place for its root!

"There was none. My fingers became sore in busying themselves with the
harsh and inhospitable stones. My feet slipped from the smooth and
slimy masonry beneath the water; and several times my face came in rude
contact with the wall, when my foothold gave way on the instant that I
seemed to have found some diminutive rocky cleat upon which I could stay
myself.

"Sir, did you ever see a rat drowned in a half-filled hogshead-how he
swims round, and round, and round; and after vainly trying the sides
again and again with his paws, fixes his eyes upon the upper rim as if
he would _look himself_ out of his watery prison?

"I thought of the miserable vermin, thought of him as I had often
watched thus his dying agonies, when a cruel urchin of eight or ten.
Boys are horribly cruel, sir; boys, women, and savages. All childlike
things are cruel; cruel from a want of thought and from perverse
ingenuity, although by instinct each of these is so tender. You may not
have observed it, but a savage is as tender to his own young as a boy
is to a favorite puppy-the same boy that will torture a kitten out of
existence. I thought then, I say, of the rat drowning in a half-filled
cask of water, and lifting his gaze out of the vessel as he grew more
and more desperate, and I flung myself on my back, and, floating thus,
fixed my eyes upon the face of the moon.

"The moon is well enough in her way, however you may look at her; but
her appearance is, to say the least of it, peculiar to a man floating on
his back