Was it night or was it day on the upper earth? In that palpable darkness, no one could tell.

I listened, and heard my heart beating. At times I thought there came other sounds to me, in my loneliness. Once a horse's hoofs rang on the pavement; a dragoon had perhaps passed through an adjacent street. At another time I heard the faint note of a trumpet; and these sounds served but to increase my fretful eagerness to be free.

I do not think that I prayed aloud to Heaven to help me; but many a deep, pious, and fervent thought swelled my heart; and after a time I took courage, and searched my whole prison minutely again for some crack, joint, or cranny, by which a passage might be forced.

Around me the walls were as solid as stone could make them; above me were the oaken beams and jointed planks, rendered quite as solid and immovable by the superincumbent load of a fallen house.

I sat down again in despair. My head was still aching, and my breast was oppressed by the difficulty experienced in respiration; my weakness and helplessness increased; sensations of suffocation were coming on, and at length I lay on the earth in the belief that I was dying. My soul trembled at the terrible conviction that I was on the verge of eternity, and I endeavoured to pray, but my thoughts and words were all too incoherent for utterance.

Wild visions floated before me, with long blanks and pauses between; and during these blanks I now believe that I must have been insensible.

My tongue was parched and burning; then imaginary fountains of pure water gushed and sparkled in the sunshine, as they poured over cool and mossy rocks into deep and shady dells; in some instances, when I approached them, the water seemed to vanish, and the bare and arid rock alone remained; in others, I was bound and fettered hand and foot, unable to move, and saw the gurgling water winding between flowery borders into the shady recesses of a wooded dell. I stretched my hands towards it; but a mighty incubus weighed down my limbs, then the vision passed away, and I lay prostrate and gasping amid a dark, a moist, and noxious atmosphere.

Many hours must thus have passed away—not less, perhaps, than six-and-thirty. I imagined that Ernestine spoke to me from time to time, and I heard her voice coming as from a vast distance. She was laughing, and we were among summer fields where the yellow corn was waving; where the green trees rustled their heavy foliage in the warm breeze, and the glossy ravens were wheeling aloft into a blue and sunny sky.

Then I heard the sound of other voices, the clink of axes and grating of shovels; I thought that the hour of deliverance was at hand; that I was about to be dug out, and restored to the upper world, and I laughed with joy. The German soldiers were jesting and singing at their work, as they seemed to draw nearer and nearer to me.

Then I heard Kœningheim say that their labour was in vain, and might be relinquished, for by this time I must assuredly be dead—and I heard them retire! Methought I strove to shout, to let them hear that I still lived, but my tongue clove to the roof of my parched throat—my hard and baked lips refused their office, and the horror of the dream awoke me for an instant to the life I had been assured was gradually passing away from me.