The Secret Shot; Or, The Rivals Of Misty Mount — page 29: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE JEWELED DAGGER. impulses of terrified surprise; what then must have been the anguish of this poor child of Juxuriows innocence at her unac- countable imprisonment? How must the heart of this little dove have palpitated with despair at discovering that the hawk had borne her to hiseyrie. But a few moments, however, were required to bring Ida to a more yalliant state of mind, for she was naturally of a brave ‘disposition, and had frequently been vaunted by her father for an amount of “pluck” beyond the, usual lot of womankind. Her thoughts were, naturally, at first occupied with reflections upon the motives which could haye prompt- ed this outrage upon her liberty and the doers of the deed. Reluctantly, but indu- bitably, she was at length forced to the con- clusion that Heartstead Gleason must be her principal persecutor, prompted by his insane passion for herself and aided by his fellow-Tories of the neighbothood; she could think of no others as concerned in the unmanly plot. Indeed, if she had been aware of the extent of Judith’s hatred to- ward herself and her family, she might have ascribed the chief complicity of the plot to where it rightly rested. _ thing of this. Her father had always been ‘singularly reticent with regard to what he might know of her, and Judith herself was but known to Ida as the bad-tempered house- keeper of Jacob Gleason, whom, according to the gossip of the yalley, she ruled with a rod of iron. Having thus satisfied her own mind as to the identity of her persecutors, and well aware of the imminent peril she was in, the brave girl arose to take a further survey of the premises. By a little careful trimming, the lamp was made to emit a considerably stronger beam, when the first novel object that attracted her attention was the door of the apartment, remarkable for its appear- ance of solidity, and for the size of the hinges and bolts which secured it, and a small win- dow or lattice, diamond-shaped, and so deeply set into the further wall of the dun- geon as to be almost invisible in an uncer- tain light. - She first tried the door—merely for the sake of trying, however, as the bolts were shot into their sockets from without the chamber, and would have defied the strength of a Milo She then tried the lat- lice, with much more confidence of success. It was only closed with a latch, and imme- diately yielded to her effort. The solid darkness which confronted her was, for an But, she knew no- instant, absolute; but presently the rays of tle lamp that swung from the ceiling strug- gled through the gloom, and glinted faintly on an obstacle a few fect from the opening This she could reach and touch with her hand, by which she was made aware that it was a blank wall of granite, crusted with glittering crystals and spars. Leaning al- most her whole body through the lattice, so thick was the wall im which it was set, she turned her glance upward, and there, far, far above her, she saw the stars shining in a clear heaven, but somewhat obstructed by what appeared the interlacing branches of trees. crystal from the opposite wall, and let it drop. <A cold shudder ran through her framé as she heard the missile going down, down — echoing and echoing against the sides of the cavern, until the reverberations gradually died away in the depths below. She could also now distinguish another She then loosened a fragment of . faint echo, which was continuous, and which she rightly conjectured to be the sound of falling water. She came to the conclusion that her dungeon lattice opened upon a fis- sure in the mountain, very narrow but of prodigious depth; and her former impres- sion that her dungeon was the cell of some cavern, piercing very deep into the moun- tain, was confirmed, She also knew, from the appearance of the stars above her head, that her cell must be very far below the sur- face of the earth. Without thinking of th illusive effect of the deep darkness through which she pecred up to the heavens, she thought that it must still be night, because the stars were shining so brightly; whereas the fact was that broad daylight had already broken upon the upper world. It took but a moment to convince her that any eseape by way of the chasm was absolutely out of the question, as the sides were almost smooth—and, had they been otherwise, the possibility of clambering them, with that dreadful, echoing, bottomless gulf below, would have been exceedingly dubious. As she was about to draw back into her cell, her eye was arrested by something which gleamed with unusual luster from a little - projection of the opposite wall, but a few feet below her position. She managed to reach and possess it, and it was with am ex- clamation of genuine joy that, when she brought it into the light, she saw that it was a small dagger, which had evidently fallen or been thrown from the top of the chasm, and had lodged on the place where she Comichboo co