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Having laid out her dress on the bed, she stood and looked down into the cheerless light-well a minute, and then decided to wake up her mother. But she stopped on the way and turned back. Why wake up mamma half an hour too soon, just to hear the sound of one's own voice? She took off her watch, and raised her hands to begin unfastening her waist.
We used to laugh about the prompter he seemed to have at the top of the light-well in the sky-light in Holden Chapel. In a deeper sense than we knew the good man received his prompting from the clear upper sky. A naturalist who sixty years ago had, and perhaps still has, a much wider fame than Asa Gray was Louis Agassiz.
As he listened, he blew smoke rings across the room and toyed with a dagger, made from a file, which had been thrown down the central light-well at him a few days before.
But it had always been to her a thing apart, a matter which the writers of romantic verse beheld and translated for the benefit of late sleepers. It never occurred to her that the day crawling into the light-well of her Clay Street flat was lit with precisely the same flame that colored the far-flung peaks of the poet's song.
A dim light struggled in from the darkened window, but no cause for apprehension could be seen. I was the only creature that breathed the air of that bleak and dingy room. I drew aside the curtain, and threw up the window. It opened merely on a light-well, and the blank walls beyond gave back the cheery reflection of a patch of sunlight that fell at an angle from above.
Near the light-well on the other side of the line of pillars, outside nature was brought within doors by a beautiful piece of fresco-painting which shows fishes swimming through the water, and dashing off foam-bells and ripples in their rapid course. Along the north wall of the room ran another gay fresco, representing a company of dancing-girls on a scale of half life-size.
There was no window, except a small one high up in the right-hand partition wall. She quite understood what that meant. It was common enough, and all too unsanitary enough, in these old and cheap tenements; the window gave, not on the out-of-doors, but on a light-well.
The pillared portico opened upon another elongated area, a characteristic feature of Minoan architecture, which served the purpose of a light-shaft, illuminating the inner room. The light-well had been covered with a brilliant white plaster, on which were the remains of a bird fresco a long, curving wing, with feathers of red, blue, yellow, white, and black.
I recall of Asa Gray, that with the class, he sat at his desk behind a substantial rail, which fenced him in from the boys in the front row, his seat a little raised and the notes before him made plain by a narrow light-well, which in the Holden of those days opened over the teacher's head to a sky-light in the roof. Gray's utterance was rather hesitant.
Or had Mother Borton played me false, and was I now a prisoner to my own party for my enforced imposture, as one who knew too much to be left at large and too little to be of use? On a second and calmer thought it was evidently folly to bring my jailers about my ears, if jailers there were. I abandoned my half-formed plan of breaking down the door, and turned to the window and the light-well.
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