Or had mice wandered to this barren place, where hard brown blades of
grass grew between the crusts of salt and the bare spots, and were
gnawing the prisoners' hard bread?

Such gnawing and grinding disturb the sleep of one who longs for slumber;
but Joshua desired to keep awake to continue to open the eyes of the
blinded youth, yet he waited in vain for any sign of life from his
nephew.

At last he was about to lay his hand on the lad's shoulder, but paused as
by the moonlight he saw Ephraim raise one arm though, before he lay down,
both hands were tied more firmly than before.

Joshua now knew that it was the youth's sharp teeth gnawing the rope
which had caused the noise that had just surprised him, and he
immediately stood up and looked first upward and then around him.

Holding his breath, the older man watched every movement, and his heart
began to throb anxiously. Ephraim meant to fly, and the first step
toward escape had already succeeded! Would that the others might prosper
too! But he feared that the liberated youth might enter the wrong path.
He was the only son of his beloved sister, a fatherless and motherless
lad, so he had never enjoyed the uninterrupted succession of precepts and
lessons which only a mother can give and a defiant young spirit will
accept from her alone. The hands of strangers had bound the sapling to a
stake and it had shot straight upward, but a mother's love would have
ennobled it with carefully chosen grafts. He had grown up beside another
hearth than his parents', yet the latter is the only true home for youth.
What marvel if he felt himself a stranger among his people.