We knew not _when_ this dreadful interment and immolation were to take place. When day dawned on us, we knew not if we should be permitted to see it close; when it closed, we knew not if we should ever behold another dawn.
So the wretched hours passed slowly, wearily on; and the close of the third day found us still captives, and still unresolved on any expedient to dree ourselves.
Sailor-like, Hartly was fertile in schemes and resources; but the former were no sooner proposed than they were abandoned as impracticable.
One time he suggested that we should endeavour to procure a light by friction, set fire to the old wooden den in which we were confined, and then seek an escape amid the consequent confusion; at another, he proposed that we should close with our guards, wrest away a musket, kill one or two of them, and fight our way off; but how could we attack women?
"If once free of the palace, the town, and its suburbs----" resumed he.
"Free! how can we remain free, Hartly, in a land where our colour, which there is _no_ disguising, renders us constantly liable to recognition, to attack, and recapture?"
"True; but if we could only reach the coast, after having so dearly learned circumspection, we might lurk in the woods."
"We have done so before. Then we might steal a canoe, or fashion one, and put to sea."
"We could steal both, as these fellows won't lend."
"Escape from this is necessary first: and in the pilfering visits you suggest, we should certainly be retaken, together or singly; and then how miserable would be the reflections of the survivor."
"Tut, Jack! unless we venture we shall never win."
"Ah, Hartly," said I, "at last I have lost all hope!"
"Do not say so; we are both too young to despair," was the sturdy response of the English sailor.
We thought of the old stereotyped modes of escape--by ropes or ladders manufactured from shirts and trowsers, and by ample melodramatic mantles; but such were impossible to us, who were nearly as nude as when we came into the world; by drugging our guards or sentinels; by bribing, coaxing, or assassinating them; but these, and all the thousand other modes by which heroic and romantic gentlemen, when in trouble or durance, effect escapes in novels and plays, were useless or impracticable there.