r appearing at times so reasonable. You have
not touched a morsel since you entered the house."--Maria sighed
intelligibly.--"Could any thing but madness produce such a disgust for
food?"

"Yes, grief; you would not ask the question if you knew what it was."
The attendant shook her head; and a ghastly smile of desperate fortitude
served as a forcible reply, and made Maria pause, before she added--"Yet
I will take some refreshment: I mean not to die.--No; I will preserve
my senses; and convince even you, sooner than you are aware of, that my
intellects have never been disturbed, though the exertion of them may
have been suspended by some infernal drug."

Doubt gathered still thicker on the brow of her guard, as she attempted
to convict her of mistake.

"Have patience!" exclaimed Maria, with a solemnity that inspired awe.
"My God! how have I been schooled into the practice!" A suffocation of
voice betrayed the agonizing emotions she was labouring to keep down;
and conquering a qualm of disgust, she calmly endeavoured to eat enough
to prove her docility, perpetually turning to the suspicious female,
whose observation she courted, while she was making the bed and
adjusting the room.

"Come to me often," said Maria, with a tone of persuasion, in
consequence of a vague plan that she had hastily adopted, when, after
surveying this woman's form and features, she felt convinced that she
had an understanding above the common standard, "and believe me mad,
till you are obliged to acknowledge the contrary." The woman was no
fool, that is, she was superior to her class; nor had misery quite
petrified the life's-blood of humanity, to which reflections on our own
misfortunes only give a more orderly course. The manner, rather than the
expostulations, of Maria made a slight suspicion dart into her mind with
corresponding sympathy, which various other avocations, and the habit
of banishing compunction, prevented her, for the present, from examining
more minutely.

But when she was told that no person, excepting the physician appointed
by her family, was to be permitted to see the lady at the end of the
gallery, she opened her keen eyes still wider, and uttered a--"hem!"
before she enquired--"Why?" She was briefly told, in reply, that the
malady was hereditary, and the fits not occurring but at very long and
irregular intervals, she must be carefully watched; for the length
of these lucid periods only rendered her more mischievous,