, from a few odd volumes of memoirs, and
collections of travels that I had happened to find stowed away behind
the others. The rest seemed sermons from the stars.

Captain Cook's voyages and Le Vaillant's descriptions did stir me very
slightly with their strong reality, and make me for a few hours forget
myself and my captivity; but all the rest prated at me like parrots,
from stately, pragmatical Johnson down to sentimental, maudlin Sterne.

I found them intolerable in the mood in which I was, nothing so
exhausting as the abstract! and closed the book desperately to resume my
diary, neglected since the awful events of Beauseincourt, but always to
me a resource in time of trouble and of solitude. Of pens, ink, paper,
there was no lack, and I wrote one day, Penelope-wise, what I destroyed
the next. Yet this very "jotting down" impressed upon my brain the few
incidents of my prison-house recorded here, that might otherwise have
faded from my memory in the twilight of monotony.

I had no need to sew. Fair linen and a sufficiency of other plain
wearing-apparel, including summer gowns, I found laid carefully in my
drawers, and the Creole negress brought in my clothes well ironed and
carefully mended, to be laid away by the orderly hands of Mrs. Clayton.

Once, during the temporary illness of this dragon (whose bed or lair was
placed absolutely across the door of egress from her closet, so as to
block the way or make it difficult of access), the Creole, in an
unavoidable contingency like this, came with a pile of clothing in her
arms to lay the pieces herself in the bureau, by direction of my jailer,
and thus revealed herself.

By the merest accident I had found in the lining of my purse two pieces
of gold (the rest of my money had been spirited away with the belt that
contained it, or the leather had been destroyed by the action of the
saltwater), and one of these I hastened to bestow on the attendant,
signifying silence by a gesture as I did so.

I knew this wretch to be wholly selfish and mercenary, from my
experience of her on the raft--for that she was the same negress I had
long ceased to doubt--and I determined, while I had an opportunity of
doing so, to enter a wedge of confidence between us in the only possible
way.

"Sabra," I whispered, "what became of the young girl, Ada Lee, and the
deformed child? It surely can do no harm to tell me this, and I know you
understand me perfectly."

"No, honey, sartinly no