Not a moment of undisturbed repose have I enjoyed for the last two months. If awake, omens and conjectures, menacing fears, and half-formed hopes, have haunted and harassed me. If asleep, dreams of agonizing forms and ever-varying hues have thronged my fancy and driven away peace. In less than an hour after landing at Boston, I placed myself in the swiftest stage, and have travelled night and day, till within a mile of this town, when the carriage was overturned and my left arm terribly shattered. I was drawn with difficulty hither; and my only hope of being once more well is founded on my continuance, for I know not how long, in one spot and one posture. By this time, the well-known hand has told you who it is that writes this:--the exile; the fugitive; whom four long years of absence and silence have not, I hope, erased from your remembrance, banished from your love, or even totally excluded from the hope of being seen again. Yet that hope, surely, must have been long ago dismissed. Acquainted as you are with some part of my destiny; of my being left on the desert shore of Japan; on the borders of a new world,--a world civilized indeed, and peopled by men, but existing in almost total separation from the other families of mankind; with language, manners, and policy almost incompatible with the existence of a stranger among them; all entrance or egress from which being commonly supposed to be prohibited by iron laws and inflexible despotism; that I, a stranger, naked, forlorn, cast upon a sandy beach frequented but at rare intervals and by savage fishermen, should find my way into the heart of this wonderful empire, and finally explore my way back to my native shore, are surely most strange and incredible achievements. Yet all this, my friend, has been endured and performed by your Colden. Finding it impossible to move immediately from this place, and this day's post having gone out before my arrival, I employed a man to carry you these assurances of my existence and return, and to bring me back intelligence of your welfare; and some news concerning--may I perish if I can, at this moment, write her name! Every moment, every mile that has brought me nearer to _her_, or rather nearer to certainty of her life or death, her happiness or misery, has increased my trepidation,--added new tremors to my heart. I have some time to spare. In spite of my impatience, my messenger cannot start within a few hours. I am little fitted, in my present state of pain and suspense, to write intelligibly. Yet what else can I do but write? and will you not, in your turn, be impatient to know by what means I have once more set my foot in my native land?