singing in the ear followed me wherever I went. On going to bed the
very stairs seemed to dance up and down under me, so that, misplacing
my foot, I sometimes fell. Talking, too, if it continued but half an
hour, exhausted me so that profuse perspiration followed, and the same
effect was produced even by an active exertion of the mind for the
like time.

"These disorders had been brought on by degrees, in consequence of the
severe labors necessarily attached to the promotion of the cause. For
seven years I had a correspondence to maintain with four hundred
persons, with my own hand; I had some book or other annually to write
in behalf of the cause. In this time I had travelled more than thirty-five
thousand miles in search of evidence, and a great part of these journeys
in the night. All this time my mind had been on the stretch. It had been
bent, too, to this one subject, for I had not even leisure to attend to my
own concerns. The various instances of barbarity which had come
successively to my knowledge, within this period, had vexed, harassed,
and afflicted it. The wound which these had produced was rendered still
deeper by those cruel disappointments before related, which arose from
the reiterated refusals of persons to give their testimony, after I had
travelled hundreds of miles in quest of them. But the severest stroke was
that inflicted by the persecution, begun and pursued by persons interested
in the continuance of the trade, of such witnesses as had been examined
against them, and whom, on account of their dependent situation in life,
it was most easy to oppress. As I had been the means of bringing these
forward on these occasions, they naturally came to me, when thus
persecuted, as the author of their miseries and their ruin. From their
supplications and wants it would have been ungenerous and ungrateful
to have fled. These different circumstances, by acting together, had at
length brought me into the situation just mentioned; and I was, therefore,