t never resting,
never leaving a stone unturned which might lead to their restitution.
The sudden discovery that the lawyers had found a flaw in the conveyance
was more than her overstrung nerves could endure, and in a fit of temper
she attacked her husband, and rushed about the town denouncing him.
Raleigh, in deepest depression of mind and body, wrote to Cecil, who had
now taken another upward step in the hierarchy of James's protean House
of Lords, and who was Earl of Salisbury henceforward:

Of the true cause of my importunities, one is, that I am every
second or third night in danger either of sudden death, or of
the loss of my limbs or sense, being sometimes two hours without
feeling or motion of my hand and whole arm. I complain not of
it. I know it vain, for there is none that hath compassion
thereof. The other, that I shall be made more than weary of my
life by her crying and bewailing, who will return in post when
she hears of your Lordship's departure, and nothing done. She
hath already brought her eldest son in one hand, and her sucking
child [Carew Raleigh, born in the winter of 1604] in another,
crying out of her and their destruction; charging me with
unnatural negligence, and that having provided for my own life,
I am without sense and compassion of theirs. These torments,
added to my desolate life--receiving nothing but torments, and
where I should look for some comfort, together with the
consideration of my cruel destiny, my days and times worn out in
trouble and imprisonment--is sufficient either utterly to
distract me, or to make me curse the time that ever I was born
into the world, and had a being.

Things were not commonly in so bad a way as this, we may be sure.
Raleigh, who did nothing by halves, was not accustomed to underrate his
own misfortunes. His health was uncertain, indeed, and it was still
worse in 1606; but his condition otherwise was not so deplorable as this
letter would tend to prove. Poor Lady Raleigh soon recovered her
equanimity, and the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir George Harvey,
indulged Raleigh in a variety of ways. He frequently invited him to his
table; and finding that the prisoner was engaged in various chemical
experiments, he lent him his private garden to set up his still in. In
one of Raleigh's few letters of this period, we get a delightful little
vignette. Raleigh is busy working in the gar