insidious peace preceding it. It is a well known and most familiar
experience to all the sons and daughters of affliction, that under no
circumstances is the piercing, lancinating torment of a recent calamity
felt so keenly as in the first moments of awaking in the morning from
the night's slumbers. Just at the very instant when the clouds of
sleep, and the whole fantastic illusions of dreaminess are dispersing,
just as the realities of life are re-assuming their steadfast forms--
re-shaping themselves--and settling anew into those fixed relations
which they are to preserve throughout the waking hours; in that
particular crisis of transition from the unreal to the real, the wo
which besieges the brain and the life-springs at the heart rushes in
afresh amongst the other crowd of realities, and has at the moment of
restoration literally the force and liveliness of a new birth--the very
same pang, and no whit feebler, as that which belonged to it when it
was first made known. From the total hush of oblivion which had buried
it and sealed it up, as it were, during the sleeping hours, it starts
into sudden life on our first awaking, and is to all intents and
purposes a new and not an old affliction--one which brings with it the
old original shock which attended its first annunciation.

That night--that first night of separation from my wife--_how_ it
passed, I know not; I know only _that_ it passed, I being in our
common bed-chamber, that holiest of all temples that are consecrated to
human attachments, whenever the heart is pure of man and woman, and the
love is strong--I being in that bedchamber, once the temple now the
sepulchre of our happiness,--I there, and my wife--my innocent wife--in
a dungeon. As the morning light began to break, somebody knocked at the
door; it was Hannah: she took my hand--misery levels all feeble
distinctions of station, sex, age--she noticed my excessive
feverishness, and gravely remonstrated with me upon the necessity there