CHAPTER VIII. MARTLET left the field, and walked towards the town. "I will now," said he, 66 go and science makes cowards of us all." Con He felt "To be, or the importance of the question, not to be," deeply; and his mind relaxed a little of its seeming former firmness. He entered the town about three o'clock in the afternoon, and wandered for a considerable time in the streets, apparently unconscious of every thing around him. The corporal of a recruiting party in the town had observed his motions; and, rightly judging him to be in distress, thought him a fit subject for his majesty's service. He accosted Martlet with the "milk of human kindness," inquired into his history, and finally led him to a public-house. Martlet was passive in his hands as a child, and he was enlisted. He was now a soldier. For three months his friends heard nothing of him, and concluded that he was numbered with the dead. But with the return of his reason, his love of his relatives revived. He wrote to his sister, imploring her forgiveness. He also wrote to his long-neglected Mary, assuring her of his unalterable love, and expressing a hope of a change of fortune. In a few days, he received a consolatory letter from his sister. His answer to it I shall here transcribe :- "MY DEAREST SISTER,-I received your letter yesterday. Nothing could possibly be so great a comfort to my own mind as such a letter in a forlorn situation like mine-one so kind and affectionate, I never anticipated, even in my most sanguine moments. I had given up all hope of ever being reconciled to any of my friends; and the only object I had in writing was simply to inform you of being alive, and to implore you to efface from memory all remembrance of an ill-fated brother. I felt a secret pleasure in being a stranger to the world, and in mourning over my sorrows in obscurity. Yet I could have borne my griefs with the most philosophic fortitude, without a murmur, had they been produced by intentional wickedness. Had they been the effect of a premeditated design to live on the labour of others, and, from a mistaken notion of my own mental capability, to rise superior to the station in which Providence had placed me, I would have bowed submissively before the moral tribunal at which I was arraigned. "Had the maxim of my accusers been Nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice,' I would have confessed my faults to their full extent, and with the meekness of a penitent. But, no; I was accused of motives of action of which I was innocent, and condemned by a set of merciless moral critics, without shewing me the fallacy of my own reasonings, or contradicting the evidence of facts, recorded on the page of biography. To those facts I appealed to shew them the folly and injustice of hasty decisions, and the consequences deducible from those facts they were unable to refute. 66 Deficiency of judgment and penetration H was, however, amply supplied by a presumptuous determination to condemn, and to invest, from the evil fertility of their own minds, the character of an enthusiastic and fanciful being with every hateful attribute. Before I had time to look around, I found myself in the midst of difficulties, and an object of unjust suspicion. My sorrows rapidly accumulated, and insanity completed the mournful climax. Since that time, the very recollection of which makes me shudder with horror, it has pleased the Almighty to restore me to my proper mind. And, oh! let me speak it to the praise of Heaven, that even in my present situation, where all sympathy is unknown, I am not without my happy moments- -moments of joyful anticipation. Amid the desolation of many of my fond hopes and projects, there still remains that which will free me from my present state of slavery. I say slavery, for we are governed by laws altogether distinct from civilised society; and in the formation of those laws no attention whatever has been paid to reason, or even the common feelings of human nature. "Remember me to all my friends, for whatever are or may have been my faults, misanthropy is not, nor ever was one of them. My love for mankind has ever been great. Kiss the dear children for me: I often think of them. Those dear domestic scenes are still vividly before me-still fresh in memory. "Adieu!" |