CHAPTER IX.
BREATHING TIME.
When our youthful hero, so suddenly rescued from a bloody death, regained the full consciousness, of which the shock seemed to have deprived him for a time, he felt like one in a dream, such a dream as enables a prisoner to escape from the slime and darkness of a subterranean dungeon, to the happiness and joy of the domestic hearth, or of boundless liberty in verdant woods, breezy groves, or sun-lit hill-tops.
Was he in Paradise? The words he had often sung in choir came into his mind,—
“In loco pascuæ ibi me collocavit,
Et super aquam refectionis educavit me.”[46]
Had the gibbet and quartering block been endured and left behind, was he in the spirit while the mutilated and desecrated members of his mortal body rotted on the gates of Exeter?