own the strip of floor like a caged beast. No
way out,--no way out!--Face to face with lingering death, why not
hasten it? No moral scruple withholds you. Yet will you not die by
your own hand. Through all your suffering you will cling to life and
worship it. Never will you open your arms to death,--which seems to
you no grave, compassionate angel, but a malignant fiend lying in
ambush for your soul. And such a fiend will your death be; for to all
men death is the reflection of their life in the mind's mirror.--Still
to and fro you fare, a moving shadow through a narrow gloom, walled in
with stone.

Awful is this unnatural sanity of intellect: it is like the calm in
the whirlwind's centre, where the waves run higher though the air is
deadly still, and the surly mariner wishes the mad wind back
again.--To and fro you flit, goaded on and strengthened by untiring
anguish. You are but the body of a man; your thought and emotion are
abroad, haunting the unconscious, happy lovers!--

Suddenly you stop short in your blind walk, throw up your arms, and
break into an irrepressible chuckle. Has your brain given way at
last?--No, your laugh is the outcome of a genuine revulsion of
feeling, intense but legitimate. What is the cause of it?--You plunge
into the rubbish-heap at one end of the room, and grasp and draw
forth the rickety old ladder which has been lying there these twenty
years. You have seen it almost daily, poking out amidst the cobwebs,
and probably for that very reason have so long failed to perceive that
it was susceptible of a better use than to be food for worms. You set
it upright against the wall; its top round falls three feet below the
horizontal aperture. Enough, if you tread with care. Narrow, steep,
and rickety is the path to deliverance; but up! for your time is
short.

Upward, with cautious eagerness! The ladder is warped and rests
unevenly, and once or twice a round cracks beneath the down-pressing
foot; the thing is all unsound and might fall to pieces at any moment.
However, the top is gained, and your nervous hands are on the sill at
last. Easing yourself a little higher, you look forth on the world
once more.

Not so late after all! Red still lingers along the western horizon,
but against it is mounting and expanding a black cloud, glancing ever
and anon with dangerous lightning. In a clear sky-lake above the
cloud, steadily burns a planet. The gentle twilight rests lovingly on
earth's warm boso