t deep solitudes, overgrown with trees, which, in these western
latitudes, are already in leaf, and very green. . . .

"All this I see, as I write, from the little door into the stern-gallery
which I mentioned just now. It don't happen six times in a day that any
other passenger comes near it; and, as the weather is amply warm enough
to admit of our sitting with it open, here we remain from morning until
night: reading, writing, talking. What our theme of conversation is, I
need not tell you. No beauty or variety makes us weary less for home. We
count the days, and say, 'When May comes, and we can say--_next
month_--the time will seem almost gone.' We are never tired of imagining
what you are all about. I allow of no calculation for the difference of
clocks, but insist on a corresponding minute in London. It is much the
shortest way, and best. . . . Yesterday, we drank your health and many
happy returns--in wine, after dinner; in a small milk-pot jug of
gin-punch, at night. And when I made a temporary table, to hold the
little candlestick, of one of my dressing-case trays; cunningly inserted
under the mattress of my berth with a weight atop of it to keep it in
its place, so that it made a perfectly exquisite bracket; we agreed,
that, please God, this should be a joke at the Star and Garter on the
second of April eighteen hundred and forty-three. If your blank _can_ be
surpassed, . . . believe me ours transcends it. My heart gets, sometimes,
SORE for home.

"At Pittsburgh I saw another solitary confinement prison: Pittsburgh
being also in Pennsylvania. A horrible thought occurred to me when I was
recalling all I had seen, that night. _What if ghosts be one of the
terrors of these jails?_ I have pondered on it often, since then. The
utter solitude by day and night; the many hours of darkness; the silence
of death; the mind forever brooding on melancholy themes, and having no
relief; sometimes an evil conscience very busy; imagine a prisoner
covering up his head in the bedclothes and looking out from time to
time, with a ghastly dread of some inexplicable silent figure that
always sits upon his bed, or stands (if a thing can be said to stand,
that never walks as men do) in the same corner of his cell. The more I
think of it, the more certain I feel that not a few of these men (during
a portion of their imprisonment at least) are nightly visited by
spectres. I did ask one man in this last jail, if he dreamed much. He
gave