I walked on, at a smart pace, for fully ten minutes, trying not to think, but feeling painfully conscious that my courage was ebbing fast. Then I paused for breath. Ugh! how foul the air smelt! I told myself that it was worse even than the impenetrable darkness--and that was bad enough. I recalled to mind how I had gone through tunnels--this very one among others--in a comfortable lighted carriage, and had drawn up the window, sharply and suddenly, to keep out the stale, poisonous air; and this was the atmosphere I was to breathe for the next hour! I shuddered at the prospect. But it was not long before I was forced to acknowledge that it was the darkness quite as much as the stifling air which was affecting me. I had never been fond of the dark in my earliest days, and now it seemed as if the strange, wild fancies of my childhood were forcing themselves upon me, and I felt that, if only for an instant, I must have light of some sort; so, standing still, I took from my pocket a box of vestas, and struck one. Holding the little match carefully, cherishing it with my hand, I gazed about me. How horrible it all looked! Worse, if possible, in reality than in imagination. The outline of the damp, mildewy wall was just visible in the feeble, flickering light. On the brickwork close to me I could see a coarse kind of fungus growing, and there was the silver, slimy trace of slugs in all directions; I could fancy, too, the hundred other creeping things that were about. As the match died out, a noise among the stones near the wall caused me hastily to strike another, just in time to see a large rat whisk into its hole. [Illustration: "HOLDING THE LITTLE MATCH CAREFULLY, I GAZED ABOUT ME."]