The sense of oppression and of being cramped amounted to intense bodily torture; thus a perspiration alternately burning hot and icy cold burst over me. The interior of this now detested prison seemed hot as a furnace; yet there was in my soul a deadly fear of perishing by cold, as I should assuredly do, if left all night on the locked wharf, in such a climate, with the thermometer at twelve degrees below the freezing point!
How fruitlessly I repented me of the silly project of thus escaping, and alternately longed to be back again in Skrew's snug counting-room, or on board the departing brig--of being anywhere, instead of being thus "cabin'd, cribb'd, confin'd," and forgotten. A terror of being conveyed on board, and left, perhaps, in the hold--left undiscovered till dead of suffocation, gave me wild energy; madly I strove to kick or beat out the head of the cask; but my legs were powerless, as if suffering from paralysis, for my aching knees were wedged under my chin, and I might as well have attempted to escape from a block of adamant.
Faintness and delirium were fast coming over me! I screamed like a madman; but my hoarse voice was lost in the hollow of the cask. Though a perspiration bathed all my aching limbs, my tongue clove to my palate, and soon became hot and dry. Starry lights seemed to flash and dance before me in the darkness; my brain reeled; then I gasped, as sense and pulsation ebbed together, and after enduring three hours (as I afterwards learned) of such agony as those who were confined in the stone chests of the Venetians, or in the iron cages which Louis XI. placed in the Bastille, alone could have known--I fainted.
On recovering, I found myself in the cabin of the _Leda_, with Captain Hartly hanging over me, and chafing my hands and temples, in anxiety and solicitude, with hartshorn and vinegar; for being a kind-hearted fellow, he was seriously alarmed.
In these friendly offices he was ably assisted by Cuffy Snowball, his black cook, who burned several grey goose-quills under my nose, and who brought me a rummer full of brandy-punch steaming hot from the galley. On swallowing this, which they forced me to do at two draughts, I became considerably revived and invigorated.