Were these delicious bells, a recent addition to the cupola of our grim
asylum, bestowed by some benevolent hand that sought to mark and lend
enchantment to the holy Sabbath-day--even for the sake of the
irresponsible ones within its walls--or was I indeed--? But of this
there could be no question--I dared not hazard such conjecture lest it
drive me mad in reality--I must not!
I groped in thick darkness, and time itself was only measured now by
those sweet chimes, so like our own, and yet so far away. My very clock
one morning was found to have stopped, and was not again repaired or set
in motion. Papers I never saw, had never seen since I came to dwell in
shadow, save that single one so ostentatiously spread before me,
announcing the loss of the Kosciusko and her passengers--a refinement of
cruelty, on the part of those who sent it, worthy of a Japanese.
Rafts had been launched and lost, the survivors stated (the men who had
seized the long-boat, to the exclusion of the women and children); the
sea had swallowed all the remainder. A later statement might refute the
first, but even then none could know the truth with regard to my
identity, for would not Basil Bainrothe control the publication as he
pleased, and make me dead if he listed--dead even after the rescue?
Yet Hope would sometimes whisper in her daring moods: "All this shall
pass away, and be as it had not been.
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