Oppressed with this belief, and distracted more by the dreadful uncertainty of whatever fate impended than he could be dismayed, he thought, by the knowledge of the worst, he sat ruminating, hour after hour, yielding his fears in succession to every haggard fancy. At last a horrible suspicion flashed suddenly across his mind, and he started up with a frantic air. “Yes!” he exclaimed, looking wildly round his dungeon, and shuddering as he spoke,—“yes! it must be so! I see it! I feel the maddening truth like scorching flames upon my brain! Eternal God! support me! it must be so! Yes, yes, _that_ is to be my fate! Yon roof will descend! these walls will hem me round, and slowly, slowly, crush me in their iron arms! Lord God! look down upon me, and in mercy strike me with instant death! O fiend! O devil!—is this your revenge?” He dashed himself upon the ground in agony, tears burst from him, and the sweat stood in large drops upon his face: he sobbed aloud, he tore his hair, he rolled about like one suffering intolerable anguish of body, and would have bitten the iron floor beneath him; he breathed fearful curses upon Tolfi, and the next moment passionate prayers to Heaven for immediate death. Then the violence of his grief became exhausted; and he lay still, weeping as a child would weep. The twilight of departing day shed its gloom around him ere he arose from that posture of utter and hopeless sorrow. He had taken no food. Not one drop of water had cooled the fever of his parched lips. Sleep had not visited his eyes for six-and-thirty hours. He was faint with hunger; weary with watching, and with the excess of his emotions. He tasted of his food; he drank with avidity of the water, and reeling, like a drunken man, to his straw, cast himself upon it to brood again over the appalling image that had fastened itself upon his almost frenzied thoughts. He slept; but his slumbers were not tranquil. He resisted, as long as he could, their approach; and when, at last, enfeebled nature yielded to their influence, he found no oblivion from his cares. Terrible dreams haunted him; ghastly visions harrowed up his imagination; he shouted and screamed, as if he already felt the dungeon’s ponderous roof descending on him; he breathed hard and thick, as though writhing between its iron walls. Then would he spring up, stare wildly about him, stretch forth his hands to be sure he yet had space enough to live, and, muttering some incoherent words, sink down again, to pass through the same fierce vicissitudes of delirious sleep.