“Because I am shut up here alone so much, a prisoner.”
“Yes, but it’s only until it’s safe for you to go away. You must see that you ought to be patient. There, I’ll bring you up books to read, to amuse you.”
“I can’t read them. They wouldn’t amuse me with my mind in this state.”
“Well; then, have a look at some of my things,” cried Waller, pulling out the drawer of a big press. “These are all traps and springs with which I catch birds and animals in the forest. Bunny Wrigg taught me how to make them and how to use them. I wish you knew him. He’s a capital fellow, and knows the forest ten times better than I do.”
“Oh, I don’t want to know the forest—nor, your friend,” said the lad wearily. “I want to be free to come and go—as free as the birds and those little animals, the squirrels, that I see out of the window.”
“Yes, of course you do, and so you shall be soon,” cried Waller. “But you haven’t quite recovered yet from that feverishness and all you went through. I say, have a look in this drawer.”
Waller thrust the open one in and pulled out another. “Look here, these are my old nets with which we drag the hammer pond, and catch the carp and tench; great golden fellows they are, some of them; but the worst of it is the pond’s so deep that the fish dive under the net and escape.”
“And those which do not,” said the lad sadly, “you take in that net and make prisoners of them. Poor things! And what good are they to you when you have caught them?”
“Good? Good to eat! I say, what a fellow you are to talk of the fish one catches as prisoners! Carp and tench are not human beings.”
“No, they are not human beings,” said the lad, smiling sadly; “but they are prisoners, the same as I am.”