But as she dropped into a straight position, and wearily abandoned her efforts to raise herself, one of her feet suddenly touched some firm substance beneath it. Something narrow it was, for the other foot as yet still hung in space, but some blessed solid thing on which it was possible to stand. As, with a feeling of thankfulness and relief such as she had never before experienced, she allowed her weight to rest on it and found that it did not give, she felt a sharp blow on the knuckles of her left hand, which made her withdraw it quickly and lean against the wall to steady herself. Mark was throwing stones at her fingers to make her leave go sooner. Another missed her narrowly, and shot over her head. She drew down her right hand, and still leaning against the wall felt about with her other foot for a support. She soon found it, a little farther back it seemed than the first foothold; but more experimental investigation showed that it was really part of the same object. There appeared, indeed, to be several of them about, all near to the wall, so that it was plain that poor Julia, as she shot over the brink, had fallen outside, and beyond them. What the bars were that she seemed to be standing on, Juliet could not at first imagine, and it was not till Mark, growing tired of waiting for a splash that never came, reached the conclusion that his ears had deceived him, and took himself and Julia's lantern off to other spheres of usefulness, that she perceived that a faint light penetrated into the upper part of the pit. When her eyes had become accustomed to it, she was able to make out that she was perched upon a portion of the roots of a tree, which had grown in through holes in the wall. Three great roots there were, curling into and across the shaft of the pit and disappearing down into the darkness below, where Juliet did not dare to look. She managed, with great caution, to stoop down and catch hold of the highest of the roots, and so to settle herself in a fairly comfortable position, sitting on the middle root of the three, with her feet on the lowest, and her back against the top one. "They might have been made on purpose," she told herself, her naturally high spirits and brave young optimism coming nobly to her rescue again. And she set herself to try and enlarge one of the holes in the wall; but she could not make much perceptible difference there. What it had taken centuries, and the growth of a great tree to effect, could not be much improved on in an hour by one young girl, however strong the necessity that urged her. By the time she had exhausted her efforts and must needs lean back and rest awhile, the biggest hole was just wide enough to put her hand through, and she saw no prospect of enlarging it further.