470 THE MATERIALIST. 



in depriving me of the very meansof subsistence, reduced me to beggary, 

 and added open mockery and insult to his villany. I have said that I 

 was proud, sensitive, high-minded. I was ignominiously thrust from 

 my own home sent to starve in the streets. Often have I wondered 

 that in my desperation, I did not waylay and murder him that 

 some deed of frantic violence did not make me amenable to the laws of 

 my country. I even yet wonder at the stern calmness which enabled 

 me to leave the house of my fathers, an outcast, a beggar, without a 

 single complaint. The world had no hold on me, I thought of no 

 hereafter ; there were no links which bound me to existence. I 

 Jaughed in derision at the base scoundrel, who, by his ingratitude, 

 had made a hell within himself, and, retiring to an obscure lodging, I 

 swallowed poison. You start but the consummation was natural. 

 What were my sensations you would ask, when the fatal draught 

 was taken? absolute indifference. I sat down, and waited for its 

 effect with a triumphant idea that I had conquered misfortune and 

 misery. The space was brief in which this was allowed me, for insensi- 

 bility like a deepsleep stole over me. How long this continued, I know 

 not but I must have been believed to be dead. I awoke shrouded 

 by the most impervious darkness, and surrounded by a noisome and 

 sickening atmosphere. As consciousness dawned upon me, a recol- 

 lection of past events rushed over my memory, and I thought with 

 agony that the great secret was about to be revealed to me that my 

 perishing body was yielding up its spiritual essence. Awe-struck, I 

 remained motionless, till the suffocating closeness of the place roused 

 my slumbering senses, and the certainty that I was a living and 

 breathing being became evident to my dizzied understanding; but 

 whether as one that had been dead, and again lives or still as a 

 mortal, I could not comprehend. By a strong effort I succeeded in 

 getting on my feet ; and the horrors of my prison-house, as I groped 

 about, had well nigh overwhelmed my yet faltering consciousness. 

 Human bodies were ranged about me in all stages of decomposi- 

 tion ; and as I grasped first here, then there, to support my stag- 

 gering steps, the yielding flesh conveyed feelings of horror and 

 disgust that words cannot convey. Joined too as this was with the 

 expectation, that all, like myself, were about to be resuscitated, big 

 drops of mortal agony started from my brow, and for the first time 

 for years I muttered or rather gasped out a prayer. You shudder 

 at the recital, and question perhaps its accuracy ; the remembrance 

 of it even now almost overpowers me and strange strange does it 

 seem, that my brain did not give way under such an accumulation of 

 excited expectation of overpowering and unnatural horrors. Strug- 

 gling fiercely maddened by my fears I sprang upon a heap of 

 bodies, and felt the roof of this Golgotha ; it consisted merely of 

 planks, and, after several furious efforts, I succeeded in escaping. 



" As the fresh night wind swept past me as the stars were seen 

 shining brightly above me, I involuntarily knelt, and, with an adora- 

 tion stirred by concatenation of strange circumstances, I poured out 

 my whole soul in prayer. This calmed my senses, and I found my- 

 self in the midst of an extensive cemetery, surrounded on all sides by 

 ranges of houses. I was naked, ghastly, tottering with weakness 



