I was become so Observant that I could observe nothing. I know not whether my senses were shut, or thrown so far open that there was no latitude for thought and recognition.

As my senses returned, I became aware of light all around me. Perhaps previously, I had awakened only at night; or perhaps in my distraction, my sight as well as my other faculties had been rendered inoperative.

I was not shut up, as I had thought, in a cellar, but rather in an upper bedroom. The heat in the room was great, it being the height of summer. I could hear the sour histling of the cicadas in the trees around the house, the crickets in the field. I imagined that should I look out through the shuttered window, I would see the willows that stood at the back of that desolate estate. Outside, the country men called to each other on the road that went by the house, and I heard, too, the daily round of the servants and family.

That I was dragged back to the place from which I had fled; back to a scene of the utmost degradation and horror, was a fact constantly before me. In my Observant state, I had even fancied that the sensation of shame inhered in the manacles, I could feel it so acutely in them; I had believed the manacles an extension of my wrists, and shame a quality radiating from them like the heat from the walls. I had been sensible of its pulses spreading throughout my arms, across my chest like the ramifying systems of artery or nerve.

My arms were shackled before me with only three links of chain between them; my feet had to suffice with four, making perambulation impossible. That I longed or rather thirsted to put my arms out straight, to swivel my legs — with a physical ache not simply the discomfort of the musculature — this may be said without surprise; yet it was the simplicity of this need which confounded me so. In other days, to raise an arm, to lower it, would be the merest twitch; to yawn, to stretch would be accounted no great freedom; and now, as in thirst we dream of water, the body told me tales of what comfort those simple actions would provide, but they were rendered the most impossible phantasy.

We believe that the body hath its rights — to move in a reasonable ambit — to raise, to lower its limbs — but across the face of this earth, there are every day those who suffer unforgivable torments, strapped or chained, confined in boxes or in the holds of ships. May the Lord remind me of this always as I walk free upon paths, and may I thus always give thanks unto Him for the strange, small gifts of gesture, of simple tasks done with requisite care and sphere of action.

Once, as I have narrated, Mr. Gitney punished me for penetrating the secret chamber of the College by forcing me to hold wide my arms, with volumes recounting the data of my life stacked upon them; and at the time, he spake of punishment as freedom. Now, imprisoned with the weight of my childhood ever more dismally heaped upon me, I longed for that earlier stint with the arms spread wide.

Such a punishment, indeed, would have seemed a freedom.