crime, I had been thrust for chastisement into a lonely garret, where,
having nothing earthly to do but look about me, I discovered (like a
prince in the Arabian Nights) a ladder leading to a trap-door, and
presently was out on a sort of stone coping, which ran round the steep
roof of the high, old-fashioned house, surveying with serene
satisfaction the extensive prospect landward and seaward, unconscious
that I was at the same time an object of terror to the beholders in the
street below. Snatched from the perilous delight of this bad eminence, I
was (again, I think, rather like the Arabian prince) forthwith plunged
into the cellar; where I curled myself up on the upper step, close to
the heavy door that had been locked upon me, partly for the comfort of
the crack of light that squeezed itself through it, and partly, I
suppose, from some vague idea that there was no bottom to the steps,
derived from my own terror rather than from any precise historical
knowledge of oubliettes and donjons, with the execrable treachery of
stairs suddenly ending in mid-darkness over an abyss. I suppose I
suffered a martyrdom of fear, for I remember upwards of thirty years
afterwards having this very cellar, and my misery in it, brought before
my mind suddenly, with intense vividness, while reading, in Victor
Hugo's Notre Dame, poor Esmeralda's piteous entreaties for deliverance
from her underground prison: "Oh laissez moi sortir! j'ai froid! j'ai
peur! et des bêtes me montent le long du corps." The latter hideous
detail certainly completes the exquisite misery of the picture. Less
justifiable than banishment to lonely garrets, whence egress was to be
found only by the roof, or dark incarceration in cellars whence was no
egress at all, was another device, adopted to impress me with the evil
of my ways, and one which seems to me so foolish in its cruelty, that
the only amazement is, how anybody entrusted with the care of children
could dream of any good result from such a method of impressing a little
girl not eight years old. There was to be an execution in the town of