e
deferred for four-and-twenty hours, and, as the succeeding day was clear
and warm, I proceeded, in spite of broken sashes, to take my daily bath
as usual at twelve o'clock.

Mrs. Clayton, with her prison-key in her pocket, and her snuffbox at
hand, yielded herself to the delight of ginger-nuts and her
stocking-basket, and rested calmly after her fatigues of the preceding
day; and Ernie, attracted by the crunching noise--the sound of dropping
nuts, perhaps, which betrayed the presence of his favorite article of
food--hastened to keep her company--a thing he never did
disinterestedly, it must be confessed.

An opportunity now presented itself for observation which I knew might
not again occur during my whole captivity; and surely no sailor ever
ascended to the mast-head of the Pinta with a heart more heaved with
emotion than was mine, as I placed my foot on the last rung of the
ladder, and towered from my waist upward above the skylight. I had drawn
the bolt within, as I invariably did while bathing, and with a feeling
of proud security I stood and surveyed the scene beneath and around me.
The angle of vision did not, it is true, embrace objects immediately
below me, owing to the projecting cornices of the flat roof (a mere
excrescence from the original structure, as this was), but beyond this
the eye swept for some distance uninterruptedly.

Bathed in the golden light of that autumn noonday sun, I saw and
recognized a long-familiar scene, and for a moment I reeled on the
slender step as I did so, and all grew dark around me. But, with one of
those energetic impulses that come to us all in time of emergency, I
recovered my balance in time to save myself from falling; and eagerly
and wistfully, as looks the dying wretch on the dear faces he is soon to
see no more, I gazed upon the paradise from which fiends had driven me.

There, indeed, just as I had left it, lay the deep-green grassy lawn,
with its richly-burdened flower-pots, its laburnums, and white and
purple lilacs, and drooping guelder-rose bushes, and its great English
walnut-tree towering, like a Titan, in the centre. There was the
hawthorn-hedge my father's hand had planted, and the fountain-like
weeping-willow my mother had set, in memory of her dead, whose graves
were far away; and there towered the lofty elm-trees, with their long,
low, sweeping branches, meeting in friendly greeting, to two of which a
swing had once been attached as a bond of union--a s