Thus, when I was roused up in the morning, and beheld a good-looking personage of about my own years shaking me by the shoulder, I regarded him only as some impertinent stranger intruding upon my privacy, saluted him with divers epithets expressive of rage and indignation, and concluded by asking him "who the devil he was?" "What! _I?_" said he, with the most doleful visage in the world; "why, Timothy--that is, Tim Doolittle, your brother-in-law--Don't you know me?" And "Don't you know _me?_ and _me?_ and _me?_ your cousin, Tom This, and your old friend, Dick That?" cried they all, with horrible long faces; the oddity of which after a while set me a laughing, especially when I came to recollect them all, as I did by-and-by when they had pronounced their names; for at each name it seemed to me as if a film fell from my eyes, and some spirit within awakened me to a vague recollection of the person to whom it belonged. In a word, I became aware that I was surrounded by a knot of my oldest and best friends, all of them excellent jolly dogs and good fellows, who were come to escort me home, and assured me that I was no longer a prisoner. I shook them all by the hand, and contrasting for a moment in my mind the melancholy condition in which I had lived as Sheppard Lee, with my present glorious state, surrounded by friends, and conscious of possessing lands, houses, stocks, Schuylkill coal-mines, and the Lord knows what other goods beside, I fell into a rapture, danced about my cell, and hugged every person present, as well as the jailer, and my old friend Darling, the attorney, who happened at that moment to enter. "Bravo!" said Tim Doolittle; "now you're the true Jack Higginson again; and I don't believe you are mad a bit." "Mad!" said I, thinking it needful to explain away that imputation, "No, and I never was. I tumbled over an old rotten fence, and hurt my head, which was, in consequence, in a whiz all day yesterday; but now it is clear enough. I think I said some silly things about one thing and another; but that's neither here nor there." "Ah!" said Tim Doolittle, touching his forehead and looking as grave as a bullfrog, "it's well it's no worse; for I always thought you had a turn for apoplexy. But I'm glad you are so well; it will be good news for poor Margaret." "Margaret! who the deuse is she?" said I, feeling quite strange at the name. "Why, my poor sister, your wife, to be sure," said he. My _wife!!!_ I recollected that I _had_ a wife; but the recollection made me feel, I knew not exactly why, as if I had been suddenly soused into cold water. It was a highly uncomfortable idea, and accordingly I hastened to get rid of it. "Let us leave this confounded place," I said; and we left the prison.