"Ha, ha!" he laughed, as though I had amused him vastly. "What distemper? Ha, ha, ha! Well upon my soul! ha, ha, ha!" he burst forth again.
His voice, when he laughed, was ample evidence that he had in his day consumed no small quantity of spirits of different sorts; for it sounded as though a goodly quantity of the liquids had remained in his throat, where it did some prodigious bubbling.
"The distempers that one gets when a prisoner here are most always of one kind. Ha, ha, ha! What distemper? Well upon my soul!" And still laughing at that which he no doubt imagined was wit, he went out and locked the door and I was again alone with my thoughts, which were no more cheerful than they had been previous to his visit.
That night my sleep, if such it may be called, was an almost endless succession of tormenting and extravagant dreams of terror, divided from each other by an awakening start of horror.
And so the weary days and nights of mine imprisonment dragged slowly on. Slowly, for the weight of sorrow and tormenting agony of uncertainty for the fate of the one I loved did impede their progress, as doth the heavy weight upon the poor snail's back cause it to drag its weary body so slowly along its slimy course.
My sole occupation, with which I tried to prevent my mind from brooding, was the reading of the different sad histories of those which writ down their thoughts, and fates to be, upon their—and now my—prison's walls. One of these, whose sadness and beautiful resignation—even though it hath no great poetic merit—most affected me, I now set down. The lines and words are imprinted on the pages of my memory with such a force as never can fade, so long as the old, worn book doth hold together. Here they are, my children; and much profit may be gathered from their calmness and resignation:—
"Somewhat musing, and more mourning,
In remembering the unsteadfastness,
This world being of such wheeling,
Me contrarying, what can I guess?
"I fear, doubtless, remediless,
Is now to seize my woful chance;
For unkindness, withouten less, (lessening)
And no redress, doth me avance.
"With displeasance, to my grievance,
And no surance of remedy;
Lo, in this trance, now in substance,
Such is my dance, willing to die.
"Methinks, truly, bounden am I,
And that greatly, to be content;
Seeing plainly Fortune doth wry
All contrary from mine intent