“Yet I did not give up my pursuit of the fugitives. No—my God! how could I forget my shame? The dearest hopes of my heart had been overthrown, and she, in whom I had trusted as man never before trusted, had wantonly deserted me—aye! even while my own kisses were still, as it were, warm upon her cheek. I had sacrificed everything at the shrine of her love; was this the return my devotedness had met with? What! she whom I had pressed to my bosom as a wife,—she whom I had made the incarnation of all ideal loveliness, to be—oh! that I should have to speak the word—a mere wanton. God of my fathers! was this the destiny to which I was condemned? “I am calmer now. I must hurry on, for my breath is rapidly failing me. My brow burns: bathe it—there, that will do. And open the window. There is something in this gentle, balmy breeze, fragrant with a thousand odors, which calls back the memory of happy days, and almost makes me weep. God grant that none of you may ever suffer as I have suffered. “I pass by three months, three long and weary months, during which I received no tidings of the fugitives. They had never been in P——; even my epistle announcing my departure to the south had never been received by Isabel, but had been sent, with most of the ensuing ones, as a dead letter to Washington. I traced the fugitives only for a single stage; there every clue to them was lost. At length I was about giving over in despair, when chance revealed what I had so long sought for in vain. “Did you ever visit an Insane Hospital? You start. Ah! you know nothing of its horrors unless you have seen your dearest friend writhing beneath the keeper’s lash, or chained like a felon by his infernal fetters. Do you understand me? No! the truth is too horrible for you to suspect. Well, then, it was in visiting one of these loathsome prison-houses that I saw and recognised, in one of its miserable victims, my own, my lost, my now suffering Isabel. “You need not think that I shall grow phrenzied by this harrowing recital. I have thought of it too often, and endured subsequent agonies too great, to suffer myself now to lose my reason in reciting it. But neither will I dwell upon that awful meeting. Suffice it to say that all my anger against Isabel departed when I saw her, who had once lain pure and trusting on my bosom, confined as a maniac, in a public hospital. Oh! I would give worlds could I shut out that horrid sight. “I soon learnt all from the keeper. Isabel had been placed there nearly _four_ months before, by a woman I instantly recognised from his description, to be the one I had procured at my marriage to wait upon Isabel. She had stated that the patient was a half sister, and had left an address where she might be found.