However patient and hopeful hitherto, fortitude now presently left him.

Suddenly, as if some contagious fever had seized him, he was afflicted with strange enchantments of misery, undreamed of till now.
He had eaten all the beef, but there was bread and water sufficient to last, by economy, for two or three days to come.

It was not the pang of hunger then, but a nightmare originating in his mysterious incarceration, which appalled him.

All through the long hours of this particular night, the sense of being masoned up in the wall, grew, and grew, and grew upon him, till again and again he lifted himself convulsively from the floor, as if vast blocks of stone had been laid on him; as if he had been digging a deep well, and the stonework with all the excavated earth had caved in upon him, where he burrowed ninety feet beneath the clover.

In the blind tomb of the midnight he stretched his two arms sideways, and felt as if coffined at not being able to extend them straight out, on opposite sides, for the narrowness of the cell.