When she had said this, they lifted my bed from the ground, and dashed over me a mass of filth.

Hardly had they passed over the threshold when the door resumed its former state.  The hinges settled back on the panels, the posts returned to the bars, and the bolts flew back to their sockets again.  I lay prostrate on the ground in a squalid plight, terrified, naked, cold, and drenched.  Indeed, I was half dead, though still alive; and pursued a train of reflections like one already in the grave, or to say the least on the way to the cross, to which I was surely destined.  “What,” said I, “will become of me, when this man is found in the morning with his throat cut?  If I tell the truth, who will believe a word of the story?  ‘You ought at least,’ they will say, ’to have called for help, if as strong a man as you are could not withstand a woman!  Is a man’s throat to be cut before your eyes, and you keep silence?  Why was it that you were not assassinated too?  How did the villains come to spare you, a witness of the murder?  They would naturally kill you, if only to put an end to all evidence of the crime.  Since your escape from death was against reason, return to it.’”

I said these things to myself over and over again, while the night was fast verging toward day.  It seemed best to me, therefore, to escape on the sly before daylight and pursue my journey, though I was all in a tremble.  I took up my bundle, put the key in the door, and drew back the bolts.  But this good and faithful door, which had opened of its own accord in the night, would not open now till I had tried the key again and again.

“Hallo, porter!” said I, “where are you?  Open the gate, I want to be off before daybreak.”

The porter, who was lying on the ground behind the door, only grunted, “Why do you want to begin a journey at this time of night?  Don’t you know the roads are infested by robbers?  You may have a mind to meet your death,—­perhaps your conscience stings you for some crime you have committed; but I haven’t a head like a pumpkin, that I should die for your sake!”

“It isn’t very far from daybreak,” said I; “and besides, what can robbers take from a traveler in utter poverty?  Don’t you know, you fool, that a naked man can’t be stripped by ten athletes?”

The drowsy porter turned over and answered;—­“And how am I to know but what you have murdered that fellow-traveler of yours that you came here with last night, and are running away to save yourself?  And now I remember that I saw Tartarus through a hole in the earth just at that hour, and Cerberus looking ready to eat me up.”

Then I came to the conclusion that the worthy Meroe had not spared my throat out of pity, but to reserve me for the cross.  So, on returning to my chamber, I thought over some speedy method of putting an end to myself; but fortune had provided me with no weapon for self-destruction, except the bedstead.  “Now, bedstead,” said I, “most dear to my soul, partner with me in so many sorrows, fully conscious and a spectator of this night’s events, and whom alone when accused I can adduce as a witness of my innocence—­do thou supply me (who would fain hasten to the shades below) a welcome instrument of death.”