It is a strange thing, but I had not associated the need of waiting with the idea of food until I found the box of biscuit. I stumbled upon the box by the accident of scratching my wrist against the edge as I crawled along the wall. I saw the corner projecting from a mound of earth, and, scraping some of the dirt away, I lifted the pine-wood lid. Inside the box I found a quantity of biscuit which seemed to have been baked recently. It was crisp, and too hard for me to break. I dipped a piece in the stagnant water, and, as I swallowed the first morsels, became aware of my ravenous hunger. I can hardly estimate the duration of the imprisonment that followed. It was of days and nights which succeeded each the other in monotonous succession, during which, like a hibernating beast, I crouched and groped within the cellar, dozing and shivering, and gnawing incessantly at my food. Only those few minutes of sunshine daily saved my reason, I am convinced now. My evening clothes, which at first had appeared to have suffered no injury during my century of sleep, had begun to disintegrate, and hung upon me in tattered fragments. It was a period of despair, with very little alternating hope. Sometimes I prayed wildly beneath the crucifix, sometimes, in an access of madness, I cried for Esther and Lazaroff again. And for whole hours I convinced myself that this was a dream. But my strength returned with amazing swiftness. As in the case of a typhoid convalescent, every particle of food seemed to build up my body. I must have put on pounds each day. The barrel framework of my ribs filled out, the muscles showed their old outlines beneath the skin, the fluid rushed into the joints and restored their suppleness. And daily I practiced exercises. I managed to drag one of the benches beneath the hole at last, and, standing on this, tried often to draw myself up; but on each occasion my struggles only brought down a shower of earth and stones, and I resigned myself to a period of further waiting, watching for dawn like a troglodyte, and for the sun like a fire-worshiper. In the end my escape developed in a manner the least imaginable. It began with my discovery of a second box in another of the mounds. I opened it hastily, in the greedy anticipation of finding something more palatable than biscuit. Instead of this I found a number of strange batons of wood. They resembled policemen’s truncheons, but each had a tiny rounded plate of glass near the head, and there evidently was some sort of mechanism near the handle, for there was a push-button, fitted with a heavy guard of brass, so strong that I could not raise it with my fingers. It was indeed providential that I was unable to do so.