It was with difficulty that Algernon and Ellen could fix their eyes upon the paper; every thing swam before them. They read in silence the following letter—with what feelings may be better imagined than described. “My beloved Wife, my own Ellen, “You must have been astonished at not hearing from me the result of the desperate attempt to escape from Verdun, of which I informed you. It succeeded! so far, at least, as getting safe out of that horrible dungeon, disguised as one of the mourners at my own funeral, according to the plan I hinted at in my letter by Maitland, and which he promised to describe to you more fully when he reached England. I made my way across the Rhine into Germany; but I found the examinations so very strict, and the officers at the custom-houses so exceedingly suspicious, that I fancied I should be safer if I advanced farther into Germany, and tried to work my way to Hamburgh. “I was, however, almost immediately seized as a spy. My ignorance of the language was supposed to be a feint, and I was passed on, from authority to authority, from governor to governor, till I believe they began to think me a person of great importance. “I was at length cast into a prison at this place; and here I have now languished more than four years. “I did not venture to write to you while wandering in France. All letters being opened, they might have led to my being traced and identified; and from the moment I was in the power of the Germans, I was not allowed the use of pen and paper, lest there might be some hidden meaning in any thing I might despatch to England. “I have now endured four years of mental anguish, such as man has seldom survived. There hangs a mist over some of the horrible years spent in this abode of misery. The wretches who drove me to desperation, treated me as a madman for resenting their cruelty, and I found myself at one time pinioned in a straight waistcoat! “Was it not enough to madden a cooler head than mine, to gall a calmer heart than mine, to be thus severed from the creature one adores, to know one’s lovely wife, left lonely and unprotected, in the bloom of youth, amid all the temptations of this corrupt world? Oh, Ellen! I shall go mad if I think of that! But you are virtuous, Ellen!—Yes, yes—if there is virtue in woman it is in you. And yet—five long years of absence! Oh! you will have forgotten me. You cannot have loved me, and me alone, in all these years! Oh God! if you should have loved another! My brain goes round! Be faithful to me, Ellen, as you value my reason, and your own welfare, here and hereafter. “But I am altered, fearfully altered. I am grown grey; I am twenty years older than when we parted. But I love you, Ellen—I love you with more ardour, more burning, maddening fervour, than when I first bore you in your maiden bloom from the home of your childhood.