their imagination, that every new object which accidentally struck
their senses, awoke to phrenzy their restless passions; as Maria
learned from the burden of their incessant ravings.

     Sometimes, with a strict injunction of silence, Jemima would
allow Maria, at the close of evening, to stray along the narrow
avenues that separated the dungeon-like apartments, leaning on her
arm.  What a change of scene!  Maria wished to pass the threshold
of her prison, yet, when by chance she met the eye of rage glaring
on her, yet unfaithful to its office, she shrunk back with more
horror and affright, than if she had stumbled over a mangled corpse.
Her busy fancy pictured the misery of a fond heart, watching over
a friend thus estranged, absent, though present--over a poor wretch
lost to reason and the social joys of existence; and losing all
consciousness of misery in its excess.  What a task, to watch the
light of reason quivering in the eye, or with agonizing expectation
to catch the beam of recollection; tantalized by hope, only to feel
despair more keenly, at finding a much loved face or voice, suddenly
remembered, or pathetically implored, only to be immediately
forgotten, or viewed with indifference or abhorrence!

     The heart-rending sigh of melancholy sunk into her soul; 
and when she retired to rest, the petrified figures she had encountered,
the only human forms she was doomed to observe, haunting her dreams
with tales of mysterious wrongs, made her wish to sleep to dream
no more.

     Day after day rolled away, and tedious as the present moment
appeared, they passed in such an unvaried tenor, Maria was surprised
to find that she had already been six weeks buried alive, and yet
had such faint hopes of effecting her enlargement.  She was,
earnestly as she had sought for employment, now angry with herself
for having been amused by writing her narrative; and grieved to
think that she had for an instant thought of any thing, 
but contriving to escape.

     Jemima had evidently pleasure in her society:  still, though
she often left her with a glow of kindness, she returned with the
same chilling air; and, when her heart appeared for a moment to
open, some suggestion of reason forcibly closed it, before she
could give utterance to the confidence Maria's conversation inspired.

     Discouraged by these changes, Maria relapsed into despondency,
when she was cheered by the alacrity with which Jemima brought her
a fresh parcel of books; assuring her, that she had taken some
pains to obtain them from one of the keepers, who attended a
gentleman confined in the opposite corner of the gallery.

     Maria took up the books with emotion.  "They come," said she,
"perhaps, from a wretch condemned, like me, to reason on the nature
of madness, by having wrecked minds continually under his eye; and
almost to wish himself--as I do--mad, to escape from the contemplation
of it." Her heart throbbed with sympathetic alarm; and she turned
over the leaves with awe, as if they had become sacred from 
passing through the hands of an unfortunate being, 
oppressed by a similar fate.

     Dryden's Fables, Milton's Paradise Lost, with several modern
productions, composed the collection.  It was a mine of treasure.
Some marginal notes, in Dryden's Fables, caught her attention:  they
were written with force and taste; and, in one of the modern
pamphlets, there was a fragment left, containing various observations
on the present state of society and government, with a comparative
view of the politics of Europe and America.  These remarks were
written with a degree of generous warmth, when alluding to the
enslaved state of the labouring majority, perfectly in unison with
Maria's mode of thinking.

     She read them over and over again; and fancy, treacherous
fancy, began to sketch a character, congenial with her own, from
these shadowy outlines.--"Was he mad?" She reperused the marginal
notes, and they seemed the production of an animated, but not of
a disturbed imagination.  Confined to this speculation, every time
she re-read them, some fresh refinement of sentiment, or accuteness
of thought impressed her, which she was astonished at herself for
not having before observed.

     What a creative power has an affectionate heart!  There are
beings who cannot live without loving, as poets love; and who feel
the electric spark of genius, wherever it awakens sentiment or
grace.  Maria had often thought, when disciplining her wayward
heart, "that to charm, was to be virtuous." "They who make me wish
to appear the most amiable and good in their eyes, must possess in
a degree," she would exclaim, "the graces and virtues they call
into action."

     She took up a book on the powers of the human mind; but, her
attention strayed from cold arguments on the nature of what she
felt, while she was feeling, and she snapt the chain of the theory
to read Dryden's Guiscard and Sigismunda.

     Maria, in the course of the ensuing day, returned some of the
books, with the hope of getting others--and more marginal notes.
Thus shut out from human intercourse, and compelled to view nothing
but the prison of vexed spirits, to meet a wretch in the same
situation, was more surely to find a friend, than to imagine a
countryman one, in a strange land, where the human voice conveys
no information to the eager ear.

     "Did you ever see the unfortunate being to whom these books