Then all at once I seemed half to awake, and fell into one of those fits of foolish nervous apprehension to which many even of the coolest and bravest are liable in deep solitude and darkness,—­and if they, how much more an excitable person like myself!  My heart throbbed for no reason, and, sitting with my head bowed down upon my hands, I fancied the most impossible dangers,—­of men taking aim at me with the antique firearms out of the far dark corners, or casting heavy weights upon me through the skylight overhead.  How easily, I fancied, could it happen.  Did not the cellar-door open just now?

I half arose, almost frightened.  I believe I should have taken an old rapier and a light and gone to look, but for very shame.  And besides, there were two thick floors between me and the door, and that itself was set in the heavy wall between the cellar of this wing of the building and that under its main body; so that if it had been opened, I could not have heard it.  Accordingly I resumed my posture and my painful intense musing.  But now I could have almost sworn that I heard soft steps coming up the staircase, and whispers floating upon the air of the great solitary room:—­I did!

But not soon enough.  At the sound of a distinct, heavy footstep behind me, I sprang up and turned about, but only to find myself pinioned by one of the arms of a rough-looking, vicious-faced man, who pressed his other hand tightly over my mouth.  A confederate was busy at the case of coins.

Although only a librarian, I have in my day been something of an athlete; much more than the person who had rushed into so sudden an intimacy reckoned upon.  And I was pretty well strung up, too, with my nonsensical fancies.

Being face to face with me, therefore, my assailant had mastered my right arm, and was clasping my back with his left hand, while his right was over my month.  So driving back my left elbow, I struck him a sharp and cruel blow in the right side, just above the hip-bone.  It is a bad place to strike; I would not hit there, unless unfairly attacked.  The sudden pain jerked a groan out of him, and surprised him into slackening his hold; so that I wrenched myself loose, and gave him a straight, heavy, right-hand hit in the nose, sending him reeling against the old chest that came over in the Mayflower, which saved him from a fall.

At one and the same moment, both the thieves drew knives and made at me together, and I, springing backwards, seized from the wooden rack of weapons the first which my hand reached.  It was a musket.  Instinctively, for there was no time to reason, I cocked, presented in a sort of charge-bayonet attitude, the only one possible, and pulled trigger.  The old weapon went off with a deafening report, sending out a blinding sheet of flame in the darkness.  One thief fell headlong at my very feet; the other, turning, fled blindly towards the staircase.  I ought to have caught him; but, in the unreflecting anger of the moment, coming up with him at the stair-head, I struck at him with such good will and good effect, that he fell down stairs faster than I cared to chase him in the dark.  Scrambling up at the bottom, he hurried out by the way he had come, and fled; while I returned to my prisoner.