In this awful situation, after his first exclamation of deadly and palsied fear, not a word, not a whisper--only sighs--escaped him. He had never prayed in his life, and knew not how to do so now. The blessed name of God had been often on his cruel lips, in many a matter-of-fact affidavit, and in many an affirmation, made falsely, but never in his heart; so now, he never thought of God or devil, of heaven nor hell, his only fear was death--extinction! And there he swung, every respiration a gasping, sobbing sigh, every pulsation a sharp pang; he had not the power to groan; as yet his long, lean, bony hands were not weary; but the branch might rend, the gorse bush uproot, and _then_---- Nevertheless he made wild and desperate efforts to escape the dreadful peril, by writhing his body upward, as his head was only some four feet below the edge of the upper rim or course of crumbling brickwork, which lined the circular shaft, and often he felt his toes scratch the wall, and heard the fragments detached thereby pass whizzing downwards; but he never heard the ascending sound of the fall below--because below was far, far down indeed! The silence was dreary--awful: he dared not look beneath, for nothing was to be seen there but the blackness of utter profundity; he could only gaze upward to where the placid stars that sparkled in the blue dome of heaven, seemed to be winking at him. He dared not cry, lest he should waste his breath and failing strength; and had he attempted to do so the sound would have died on his parched and quivering lips. In every pulsation he lived his lifetime over again, and all the secret crimes of that lifetime were, perhaps, being atoned for now. The widows who, without avail or winning pity, had wept, (in that inquisitorial camera de los tormentos, his "office,"), for the loss of the hard-won savings of dead husbands, their children's bread; wretches from under whose emaciated forms he had dragged the bare pallet, leaving them to die on a bed of cinders, and all in form and process of law; the strong and brave spirited men, who had lifted up their hard hands and hoarsely cursed him, ere they betook them to the parish union or worse; the starvelings who had perhaps gained their suits, but only in their last coats; the crimes that some had committed through the poverty and despair he had brought upon them; the unsuspecting, into whose private and monetary matters he had wormed himself by specious offers of gratuitous assistance and advice--a special legal snare--by the open and too often secret appropriation of valuable papers; and by the thousand wiles and crooks of policy known only to that curse of society, the low legal practitioner, seemed all to rise before him like a black cloud now; and out of that cloud, the faces of his pale victims seemed to mock, jibe, and jabber at him.