reprieved_. I knew not what I did. Whether the tone of my voice, untutored
in such business, had raised a momentary hope, I know not--but the
revulsion was dreadful. He stared with a vacant look of sudden horror--a
look which those who never saw cannot conceive, and which--(the
remembrance is enough)--I hope never to see again--and twisting round,
rolled upon his pallet with a stifled moan that seemed tearing him in
pieces. As he lay, moaning and writhing backwards and forwards, the
convulsions of his legs, the twisting of his fingers, and the shiverings
that ran through his frame were terrible.

To attempt to rouse him seemed only to increase their violence--as if the
very sound of the human voice was, under his dreadful circumstances,
intolerable, as renewing the sense of reality to a reason already clouding,
and upon the verge of temporary deliquium. He was the picture of despair.
As he turned his face to one side, I saw that a few, but very few hot
tears had been forced from his glassy and blood-shot eyes; and in his
writhings he had scratched one cheek against his iron bedstead, the red
discoloration of which contrasted sadly with the deathly pallidness of hue,
which his visage now showed: during his struggles, one shoe had come off,
and lay unheeded on the damp stone-floor. The demon was triumphant within
him; and when he groaned, the sound seemed scarcely that of a human being,
so much had horror changed it. I kneeled over him--but in vain. He heard
nothing--he felt nothing--he knew nothing, but that extremity of
prostration to which a moment's respite would be Dives' drop of water--and
yet in such circumstances, any thing but a mercy. He could not bear, for a
moment, to think upon his own death--a moment's respite would only have
added new strength to the agony--He might _be_ dead; but could not "--die;"
and in the storm of my agitation and pity, I prayed to the Almighty to
relieve him at once from sufferings which seemed too horrible even to be
contemplated.