d with their escape from France,
into which they had entered with an enthusiasm of patriotic devotion.
Ah, France! thou hast ruined the character of a Revolution virtuously
begun, and destroyed those who produced it. I might almost say like
Job's servant, "and I only am escaped."

Two days after they were gone I heard a rapping at the gate, and looking
out of the window of the bed room I saw the landlord going with the
candle to the gate, which he opened, and a guard with musquets and fixed
bayonets entered. I went to bed again, and made up my mind for prison,
for I was then the only lodger. It was a guard to take up [Johnson and
Choppin], but, I thank God, they were out of their reach.

The guard came about a month after in the night, and took away the
landlord Georgeit; and the scene in the house finished with the
arrestation of myself. This was soon after you called on me, and sorry
I was it was not in my power to render to [Sir Robert Smyth] the service
that you asked.

I have now fulfilled my engagement, and I hope your expectation, in
relating the case of [Johnson], landed back on the shore of life, by
the mistake of the pilot who was conducting him out; and preserved
afterwards from prison, perhaps a worse fate, without knowing it
himself.

You say a story cannot be too melancholy for you. This is interesting
and affecting, but not melancholy. It may raise in your mind a
sympathetic sentiment in reading it; and though it may start a tear of
pity, you will not have a tear of sorrow to drop on the page.

*****

Here, my contemplative correspondent, let us stop and look back upon the
scene. The matters here related being all facts, are strongly pictured
in my mind, and in this sense Forgetfulness does not apply. But facts
and feelings are distinct things, and it is against feelings that the
opium wand of Forgetfulness draws us into ease. Look back on any scene
or subject that once gave you distress, for all of us have felt some,
and you will find, that though the remembrance of the fact is not
extinct in your memory, the feeling is extinct in your mind. You can
remember when you had felt distress, but you cannot feel that distress
again, and perhaps will wonder you felt it then. It is like a shadow
that loses itself by light.

It is often difficult to know what is a misfortune: that which we feel
as a great one today, may be the means of turning aside our steps into
some new path that leads to happiness yet