‘But, tell me,’ I interrupted—when we heard the voice of the provost-marshal without, calling, ‘Lazarillo, Lazarillo, what keeps you?’ The turnkey made but one bound of it to the door, locked the cell with a clash, and hurried away, leaving me with an aching hand, but a palpitating and a very grateful heart. All was not yet over with me. I had still a right to the rays of the sun. The black grave, which in my mind I had seen for the last hour continually yawning before me, was gone. Most blessed of the moods of the heart, Hope, slid again into my being, and sent the hot blood dancing madly through my veins. I paced up and down the cell wildly. I tried to leap at the barred window. The pain of my lacerated flesh I remembered no more; and clenching both fists, I vowed that, once without these walls, it was only a dead body which the Spaniards would bring back. The roar of the conflict in the harbour, which still continued, worked me up to the highest pitch of excitement. I sought to distinguish, in fancy, between the guns of our enemies and those of my friends; and every time I heard the sharp ring of the smaller metal, which I concluded was fired from aboard the schooner, I broke out in rhapsodies, calling upon the ball to fly truly home to its mark, and to hit that pestilent alcaide or his ferret-eyed clerk. At length I began to cool down, and get somewhat ashamed of my fervour. Besides, the noise of cannonading abated—the reports of the guns coming fainter and fainter, as if the fight were being carried on more to seaward. From this I judged that the schooner had been beaten off. Indeed, I could expect no other termination of the attack, which, when I came to think of it in sober earnest, appeared to me to be little short of madness, and I wondered how Stout Jem had come to attempt it. From these matters I began to think more reasonably of my own situation. I little doubted but that my unknown friend was no other than Don José, who appeared to my mind to be as singular a mixture of base and generous; qualities as a man could be composed of. But how was he to help me? Was the mode of escape to be by force or escalade? To cut the window-bars would require a file, and to mount to them a ladder. Then, my left hand was in a bad condition for either working or clambering, and even should I succeed in making my way into the city, whither was I to go next? I had no place of refuge, but the woods, and without arms or ammunition, little hope of aught but a lingering death there, either by starvation or wild Indians. Indeed, the more I mused, the more gloomy after all my prospects seemed.