the earth." He turned the handle in my girdle again, and I fell flat on the floor, bruising my face and chest against it; but after this first taste of the terrible punishment that was in store for me, I wished that I had been killed outright by the fall. The executioner now removed his ingenious but horrible apparatus from me, and carried it away with him, leaving two of his assistants in charge. I tried to pass away the time by speaking to these creatures, but this was a hopeless task. They had but few ideas except about executions; this evidently was their specialty, and they stuck to it.
Broken-hearted, and worn out in mind and in body, and in very soul, I retired to a corner of the dungeon, and threw myself down on the floor, and there I started for the hundredth time to try and unravel the mystery of my position. My recollections of my first life, my first wife, and my children, were all mixed up in a mysterious jumble with modern habits and customs, modern language, music, art, and science. Where one begun or the other ended,
