While yet the last ominous and deceitful reply which Dr. Rowel had made to James Woodruff rung in his ear, as a sound incredible and impossible to have been heard, he threw himself on the loose straw which covered an iron bedstead that stood in a corner of his cell, and writhed in bodily and in mental agony, both from what he had just endured, and from the stinging reflections that, having once had his oppressor in his power, he should have so spared him, so confided in his promises, and been so treacherously deceived! The consciousness of his own magnanimity, and implicit faith in his brother-in-law's solemn word and oath, aggravated the bitterness of these reflections, until the despair within him became worse to endure than all the horrors without. All hope of freedom had now finally departed. He had made the last and greatest sacrifice in his power to obtain it, and it had only been cast back in his face as worthless, because it would be considered as the act of a madman. He had implored, promised, threatened,--nay, he had put his very life in peril,--and all for what? for nothing. What more remained to do?--To wait the doubtful result of chance for an unforeseen and apparently impossible deliverance,--to waste away the last pulsations of a worse than worthless life in the protracted misery of that dungeon,--or to take heart in this extremity to do a deed that should at once shut the gates of hope and of fear in this world upon him for ever? Would it not be better to beat out his brains against the wall, and throw himself, uncalled, before his God, his wretchedness standing in extenuation of his crime, than thus to do and to suffer by hours, days, nights, and years, with no change that marked to-day from yesterday, or this year from the year that went before, nor any chance of change to distinguish the years to come from those that had already passed? In the same monotonous round of darkness passed in that cell, of pacing some few steps to his day-yard, of turnings and returnings within that limited space, and then of pacing back to pass hours of darkness in his cell again,--time seemed to stand still, or only to return at daylight, and work over again the same well-known revolution that it wrought when daylight last appeared. Looking back beyond these dreary seventeen years, what had his mind to rest upon? Sorrow for his wife's premature death; solicitude, painful and unfathomably deep, for the babe she had left to his sole care; his struggle onwards solely on account of the little helpless thing that had no friend but him; and then the sudden, the unexpected, and horrible injustice of an avaricious brother-in-law, which had overwhelmed him as with an avalanche, deprived him of all he possessed, shut him up in a place of horrors, and, worst of all, put away that child, motherless and fatherless, to endure perhaps all that the lowest poverty endures, or to sink under it when she could endure no longer.