Watching none the less strictly, she gradually relaxed that personal surveillance that is ever so intolerable to the proud and delicate-minded, and those suggestions that, however well intended, had been so irritating to me from such a source.  She no longer urged me to read, or sew, or eat, or take exercise; but, retiring into her own work (whence she could observe me at her pleasure, for her door was always set wide open, and her face turned in my direction), she employed or feigned to employ herself in her inexhaustible stocking-basket or scollop-work, either one the last resource of idiocy, as it seemed to me.

Left thus to myself in some degree, I unclosed the leaves of the bookcase, and surveyed its grim array of “classics”—­all new and unmarked by any name, or sign of having been read—­and from them I selected a few worthies, through whose pages I delved drearily and industriously, and most unprofitably it must be confessed.  The only living sensations I received from the contents of that bookcase were, I am ashamed to acknowledge, from a few odd volumes of memoirs, and collections of travels that I had happened to find stowed away behind the others.  The rest seemed sermons from the stars.

Captain Cook’s voyages and LeVaillant’s descriptions did stir me very slightly with their strong reality, and make me for a few hours forget myself and my captivity; but all the rest prated at me like parrots, from stately, pragmatical Johnson down to sentimental, maudlin Sterne.

I found them intolerable in the mood in which I was, nothing so exhausting as the abstract! and closed the book desperately to resume my diary, neglected since the awful events of Beauseincourt, but always to me a resource in time of trouble and of solitude.  Of pens, ink, paper, there was no lack, and I wrote one day, Penelope-wise, what I destroyed the next.  Yet this very “jotting down” impressed upon my brain the few incidents of my prison-house recorded here, that might otherwise have faded from my memory in the twilight of monotony.

I had no need to sew.  Fair linen and a sufficiency of other plain wearing-apparel, including summer gowns, I found laid carefully in my drawers, and the creole negress brought in my clothes well ironed and carefully mended, to be laid away by the orderly hands of Mrs. Clayton.

Once, during the temporary illness of this dragon (whose bed or lair was placed absolutely across the door of egress from her closet, so as to block the way or make it difficult of access), the creole, in an unavoidable contingency like this, came with a pile of clothing in her arms to lay the pieces herself in the bureau, by direction of my jailer, and thus revealed herself.

By the merest accident I had found in the lining of my purse two pieces of gold (the rest of my money had been spirited away with the belt that contained it, or the leather had been destroyed by the action of the saltwater), and one of these I hastened to bestow on the attendant, signifying silence by a gesture as I did so.