I may be more rhetorical than he was, but he made all the more of these
conditions while experiencing them, because he knew they could not last
out the thirty days, nor half the thirty, and took modest comfort in a
will strong enough to meet all present demands, well knowing there was one
exigency yet to arise, one old usurer still to be settled with who had not
yet brought in his dun.
V
It came--began to come--in the middle of the second week. At its familiar
approach he felt no dismay, save a certain inert dismay that it brought
none. Three, four, five times he went bravely to the rill, drowned his
thirst and called himself satisfied; but the second day was worse than the
first; the craving seemed better than the rill's brief cure of it, and
once he rose straight from drinking of the stream and climbed the dune to
look for a sail.
He strove in vain to labor. The pleasures of toil were as stale as those
of idleness. His books were put aside with a shudder, and he walked abroad
with a changed gait; the old extortioner was levying on his nerves. And on
his brain. He dreamed that night of war times; found himself commander of
a whole battery of heavy guns, and lo, they were all quaker cannon.
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