d from bad to worse, in such a case, was, at
any rate, a natural progress; but, perhaps, also amongst this crowd of
the poor, the abjectly wretched, the ill-fed, the desponding, and the
dissolute, there might be very naturally a larger body of contagion
lurking than accorded to their mere numerical expectations. There was at
that season a very extensive depopulation going on in some quarters of
this great metropolis, and in other cities of the same empire, by means
of a very malignant typhus. This fever is supposed to be the peculiar
product of jails; and though it had not as yet been felt as a scourge
and devastator of this particular jail, or at least the consequent
mortality had been hitherto kept down to a moderate amount, yet it was
highly probable that a certain quantity of contagion, much beyond the
proportion of other popular assemblages less uniformly wretched in their
composition, was here to be found all day long; and doubtless my excited
state, and irritable habit of body, had offered a peculiar
predisposition that favoured the rapid development of this contagion.
However this might be, the result was, that on the evening of the second
day which I spent in haunting the purlieus of the prison (consequently
the night preceding the second public examination of Agnes), I was
attacked by ardent fever in such unmitigated fury, that before morning I
had lost all command of my intellectual faculties. For some weeks I
became a pitiable maniac, and in every sense the wreck of my former
self; and seven entire weeks, together with the better half of an eighth
week, had passed over my head whilst I lay unconscious of time and its
dreadful freight of events, excepting in so far as my disordered brain,
by its fantastic coinages, created endless mimicries and mockeries of
these events--less substantial, but oftentimes less afflicting, or less
agitating. It would have been well for me had my destiny decided that I
was not to be recalled to this world of wo. But I had no such happiness
in store. I recovered, and through twenty and eight years my groans
have recorded the sorrow I feel that I did.

* * * * *

I shall not rehearse circumstantially, and point by point, the sad
unfolding, as it proceeded through successive revelations to me, of all
which had happened during my state of physical incapacity. When I first
became aware that my wandering senses had returned to me, and knew, by the
cessat