Another restless night; no sleep; morning came.  The second day passed like the first, and the night.  On the third morning the flowers lay shrunken by his side.  Drops of wet oozing through the air-slits, fell dully on the stone floor.  He heard the dreary beatings of the tree’s leaves against the mouths of the griffins, bedashing them with the spray of the rain-storm without.  At intervals a burst of thunder rolled over his head, and lightning flashing down through the slits, lit up the cell with a greenish glare, followed by sharp splashings and rattlings of the redoubled rain-storm.

“This is the morning of the third day,” murmured Israel to himself; “he said he would at the furthest come to me on the morning of the third day.  This is it.  Patience, he will be here yet.  Morning lasts till noon.”

But, owing to the murkiness of the day, it was very hard to tell when noon came.  Israel refused to credit that noon had come and gone, till dusk set plainly in.  Dreading he knew not what, he found himself buried in the darkness of still another night.  However patient and hopeful hitherto, fortitude now presently left him.  Suddenly, as if some contagious fever had seized him, he was afflicted with strange enchantments of misery, undreamed of till now.

He had eaten all the beef, but there was bread and water sufficient to last, by economy, for two or three days to come.  It was not the pang of hunger then, but a nightmare originating in his mysterious incarceration, which appalled him.  All through the long hours of this particular night, the sense of being masoned up in the wall, grew, and grew, and grew upon him, till again and again he lifted himself convulsively from the floor, as if vast blocks of stone had been laid on him; as if he had been digging a deep well, and the stonework with all the excavated earth had caved in upon him, where he burrowed ninety feet beneath the clover.  In the blind tomb of the midnight he stretched his two arms sideways, and felt as if coffined at not being able to extend them straight out, on opposite sides, for the narrowness of the cell.  He seated himself against one side of the wall, crosswise with the cell, and pushed with his feet at the opposite wall.  But still mindful of his promise in this extremity, he uttered no cry.  He mutely raved in the darkness.  The delirious sense of the absence of light was soon added to his other delirium as to the contraction of space.  The lids of his eyes burst with impotent distension.  Then he thought the air itself was getting unbearable.  He stood up at the griffin slits, pressing his lips far into them till he moulded his lips there, to suck the utmost of the open air possible.