So soon as Elfric could get the gag out of his mouth, and recover from his first astonishment, he began to think; and he thought that this was but a bad return for his fighting and risking death for the sake of the stomachs and bowels of the monks of Ely; and he became convinced in his own mind that the traitorous monks must have made away with the noble Abbat Thurstan, and have consummated their treachery: and then he thought of his friends in the Camp of Refuge, and at Hadenham, and of the Lord Hereward and the Ladie Alftrude, and, most of all, of the maid Mildred! And then there came before him the ghastly face of the Salernitan, and rang in his ears, like a knell, the words which the dying Girolamo had used in the morning, when speaking of the hard doom of his beloved! And, next to this, he bethought himself of the fearful legend of the house of Ely, which related how the blinded prince, who had pined so long in those dreary vaults, had ever since haunted them under the most frightful forms! Yet when his lively fancy had brought all these things before him, and even when he had become convinced that he would be buried alive, or left to starve and gnaw the flesh from his own bones in that truly hellish pit, which he knew was as dark by day as by night, a sudden and sweet calm came over his distraught mind; and he kneeled on the cold slimy floor of the dungeon and raised to heaven his hands, which he could not see himself, but which were well seen by the saints above, unto whom thick darkness is as bright light; and when he had said a short prayer for himself and for his Mildred, for his generous lord and most bountiful ladie, he threw himself along the ground, and laying his left arm under his head for a pillow, he made himself up for sleep. “Come what will,” said he, “I have been true to my God, to my saints, to my country, to my church, to my lord and master, and to my love! This martyrdom will soon be over! Not these deep hollows of the earth, nor all the weight of all the walls and arched roofs and springing towers of Ely Abbey can crush or confine, or keep down, the immortal spirit of man! Mildred! my Lord Hereward! my noble lady and mistress! and thou, oh joyous and Saxon-hearted Lord Abbat Thurstan! if traitors have it their own way here, we meet in heaven, where there be no Normans and no Saxon traitors!” And so saying, or thinking, and being worn out by excess of fatigue, or rather by the excessiveness of his late short moral anguish,—an agony sharper than that of the rack, upon which men are said to have fallen asleep,—Elfric in a very few moments fell into the soundest of all sleeps. The toads, which fatten in darkness, among the noxious and colourless weeds which grow where light is not, and the earth-worms crawled over and over him, but without awakening him, or giving him any disturbance in his deep sleep. And as he slept, that black and horrent dungeon, in which his body lay, was changed, by the bright visions