Then came a time for the poor fellow when he prayed for death at last. With the rotting leaves of the previous autumn forming a slimy pillow for his head, his body sinking slowly into the damp earth, while a rising wind moaned a low dirge among the surrounding hills and swept over the thinly-leaved branches above his head with a sepulchral “hush!” he felt all the horrors of the grave, all its loneliness, all its impotence, without the one blessing--peace, which we hope for there in spite of the clergy, who are ferocious as regards the next world to counter-balance their meekness in this. The deft Rahas had bound him sailor-fashion, beginning with the middle of the rope; and the knots were immovable as iron; he began to feel cramped and benumbed by the cold, the rising moisture amid the undergrowth of the wood, and the impeded circulation of his blood. Still his head remained hot as fire, his brain reeling in a mad dance of fantastic tortures, until at last frenzy came, and pictures of the past chased each other through his memory, but with a lurid light of horror upon them which distorted his fairest recollections, and turned them into ugly nightmares. Then in turn the pictures faded and his senses began to grow dull, and strange cries to sound in his ears to which he tried to reply; but his voice would not come, and even as his lips moved in this effort, the last gleam of sense left him, and he fell into unconsciousness. As upon the blackness of night the fair, pure dawn comes gradually, so George, from the stupor of a deadly lethargy, woke by slow degrees to sensations of warmth, and light, and joy; and feeling, before the sense of sight came back to him, a soft touch on his flesh that set him quivering, and a breath against his lips that exhaled the very perfume of love, he fancied in the first moments of a still feebly moving brain, that his prayer had been granted, that he was dead, and in Heaven. Until suddenly there burst upon his ears a wild, joyous cry: “He is breathing! He has come back to me--back, thank God! thank God!”