amongst this crowd of the poor, the abjectly wretched, the ill-fed, the
desponding, and the dissolute, there might be very naturally a larger
body of contagion lurking than according to their mere numerical
expectations. There was at that season a very extensive depopulation
going on in some quarters of this great metropolis, and in other cities
of the same empire, by means of a very malignant typhus. This fever is
supposed to be the peculiar product of jails; and though it had not as
yet been felt as a scourge and devastator of this particular jail, or
at least the consequent mortality had been hitherto kept down to a
moderate amount, yet it was highly probable that a certain quantity of
contagion, much beyond the proportion of other popular assemblages less
uniformly wretched in their composition, was here to be found all day
long; and doubtless my excited state, and irritable habit of body, had
offered a peculiar predisposition that favored the rapid development of
this contagion. However this might be, the result was, that on the
evening of the second day which I spent in haunting the purlieus of the
prison, (consequently the night preceding the second public examination
of Agnes,) I was attacked by ardent fever in such unmitigated fury,
that before morning I had lost all command of my intellectual
faculties. For some weeks I became a pitiable maniac, and in every
sense the wreck of my former self; and seven entire weeks, together
with the better half of an eighth week, had passed over my head whilst
I lay unconscious of time and its dreadful freight of events, excepting
in so far as my disordered brain, by its fantastic coinages, created
endless mimicries and mockeries of these events--less substantial, but
oftentimes less afflicting, or less agitating. It would have been well
for me had my destiny decided that I was not to be recalled to this
world of wo. But I had no such happiness in store. I recovered, and
through twenty and eight years my groans have recorded the sorrow I
feel that I did.