these stationary elements of this miscellaneous population, were others
drawn thither by pure motives of curiosity, so that altogether an
almost permanent mob was gathered together in these courts; and amid
this mob it was,--from I know not what definite motive, partly because
I thought it probable that amongst these people I should hear the cause
of Agnes peculiarly the subject of conversation; and so, in fact, it
did really happen,--but partly, and even more, I believe, because I now
awfully began to shrink from solitude. Tumult I must have, and
distraction of thought. Amid this mob, I say, it was that I passed two
days. Feverish I had been from the first--and from bad to worse, in
such a case, was, at any rate, a natural progress; but, perhaps, also
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