Time and change of scene will, no doubt, relieve me; but, in the mean time, I have not a name for that wretchedness into which I am sunk. The light of day, the company of mankind, is at this moment insupportable. Of all places in the world, _this_ is the most hateful to my soul. I should not have entered the city, I should not abide in it a moment, were it not for a thought that occurred just before I left Baltimore. You know the mysterious and inexplicable calumny which has heightened Mrs. Fielder's antipathy against me. Of late, I have been continually ruminating on it, and especially since Mrs. Talbot's last letter. Methinks it is impossible for me to leave the country till I have cleared her character of this horrid aspersion. Can there be any harmony between mother and child, must not suspicion and mistrust perpetually rankle in their bosoms, while this imposture is believed? Yet how to detect the fraud--Some clue must be discernible; perseverance must light on it at last. The agent in this sordid iniquity must be human; must be influenced by the ordinary motives; must be capable of remorse or of error; must have moments of repentance or of negligence. My mind was particularly full of this subject in a midnight ramble which I took just before I left Baltimore. Something--I know not what--recalled to my mind a conversation which I had with the poor washwoman at Wilmington. Miss Jessup, whom you well know by my report, passed through Wilmington just as I left the sick woman's house, and stopped a moment just to give me a "How d'ye" and to drop some railleries founded on my visits to Miss Secker, a single and solitary lady. On reaching Philadelphia, she amused herself with perplexing Jane by jesting exaggerations on the same subject, in a way that seemed to argue somewhat of malignity; yet I thought nothing of it at the time. On my next visit to the sick woman, it occurred to me, for want of other topics of conversation, to introduce Miss Jessup. Did she know any thing, I asked, of that lady? Oh, yes, was the answer. A great deal. She lived a long time in the family. She remembered her well, and was a sufferer by many of her freaks. It was always disagreeable to me to listen to the slanderous prate of servants; I am careful, whenever it intrudes itself, to discourage and rebuke it; but just at this time I felt some resentment against this lady, and hardly supposed it possible for any slanderer to exaggerate her contemptible qualities. I suffered her therefore to run on in a tedious and minute detail of the capricious, peevish, and captious deportment of Miss Jessup.