feet; but this pained my shin-bones.

The cell had been finished with lime and plaster but eleven days,
and everybody supposed it would be impossible I should exist in
these damps above a fortnight. I remained six months, continually
immersed in very cold water, that trickled upon me from the thick
arches under which I was; and I can safely affirm that, for the
first three months, I was never dry; yet did I continue in health.
I was visited daily, at noon, after relieving guard, and the doors
were then obliged to be left open for some minutes, otherwise the
dampness of the air put out their candles.

This was my situation, and here I sat, destitute of friends,
helplessly wretched, preyed on by all the torture of thought that
continually suggested the most gloomy, the most horrid, the most
dreadful of images. My heart was not yet wholly turned to stone; my
fortitude was sunken to despondency; my dungeon was the very cave of
despair; yet was my arm restrained, and this excess of misery
endured.

How then may hope be wholly eradicated from the heart of man? My
fortitude, after some time, began to revive; I glowed with the
desire of convincing the world I was capable of suffering what man
had never suffered before; perhaps of at last emerging from this
load of wretchedness triumphant over my enemies. So long and
ardently did my fancy dwell on this picture, that my mind at length
acquired a heroism which Socrates himself certainly never possessed.
Age had benumbed his sense of pleasure, and he drank the poisonous
draught with cool indifference; but I was young, inured to high
hopes, yet now beholding deliverance impossible, or at an immense, a