Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/221

 hemp; and it beguiled the time to him to recall the narratives that he had read in his college books, and after college in other books that his ecclesiastical masters called heretical and damnable, since they treated of geology and science.

Time was long and dull; he could hardly keep so much count of it as the Etruscans had kept of the years that they marked by nails in their temples.

The hours were all so precisely similar, so uneventful; so like was the night to the day, here, where he never saw the sun itself, but only some stray thread of it which came down through the briony and bindweed, some faint reflection of it which shone through the open doorway of the entrance-cell, that all the weeks became confused in his mind into one blurred, grey, colourless mass of time that might have been a century, so long it seemed. He used to think that he would remain here till he became like Carolus Magnus in the depths of the Unterberg, with grey beard grown downward to the stones, and the ages rolling on without awaking him.

His life seemed to him broken in his hands; like a plume of golden-rod or red