dition overwhelmed me; it was like passing from life into
eternity. Every year to be as long as three, _i.e._, to have three times
as much real time--time that is my own--in it! I wandered about thinking
I was happy, but feeling I was not. But that tumultuousness is passing
off, and I begin to understand the nature of the gift. Holidays, even
the annual month, were always uneasy joys,--their conscious
fugitiveness; the craving after making the most of them. Now, when all
is holiday, there are no holidays. I can sit at home, in rain or shine,
without a restless impulse for walkings. I am daily steadying, and shall
soon find it as natural to me to be my own master as it has been irksome
to have had a master. Mary wakes every morning with an obscure feeling
that some good has happened to us.

Leigh Hunt and Montgomery, after their releasements, describe the shock
of their emancipation much as I feel mine. But it hurt their frames. I
eat, drink, and sleep sound as ever, I lay no anxious schemes for going
hither and thither, but take things as they occur. Yesterday I
excursioned twenty miles; to-day I write a few letters. Pleasuring was
for fugitive play-days: mine are fugitive only in the sense that life is
fugitive. Freedom and life co-existent!

At the foot of such a call upon you for gratulation, I am ashamed to
advert to that melancholy event. Monkhouse was a character I learned to
love slowly; but it grew upon me yearly, monthly, daily. What a chasm
has it made in our pleasant parties! His noble, friendly face was always
coming before me, till this hurrying event in my life came, and for the
time has absorbed all interest; in fact, it has shaken me a little. My
old desk companions, with whom I have had such merry hours, seem to
reproach me for removing my lot from among them. They were pleasant
creatures; but to the anxieties of business, and a weight of possible
worse ever impending, I was not equal. Tuthill and Gilman gave me my
certificates; I laughed at the friendly lie implied in them. But my
sister shook her head, and said it was all true. Indeed, this last
winter I was jaded out; winters were always worse than other parts of
the year, because the spirits are worse, and I had no daylight. In
summer I had daylight evenings. The relief was hinted to me from a
superior power when I, poor slave, had not a hope but that I must wait
another seven years with Jacob; and lo! the Rachel which I coveted is
brought to me.