harge, without too minutely enquiring into the cause; and such was her
eagerness to hold human converse, and to see her former protector, still
a stranger to her, that she incessantly requested her guard to gratify
her more than curiosity.

Writing to Darnford, she was led from the sad objects before her, and
frequently rendered insensible to the horrid noises around her, which
previously had continually employed her feverish fancy. Thinking it
selfish to dwell on her own sufferings, when in the midst of wretches,
who had not only lost all that endears life, but their very selves, her
imagination was occupied with melancholy earnestness to trace the mazes
of misery, through which so many wretches must have passed to this gloomy
receptacle of disjointed souls, to the grand source of human corruption.
Often at midnight was she waked by the dismal shrieks of demoniac rage,
or of excruciating despair, uttered in such wild tones of indescribable
anguish as proved the total absence of reason, and roused phantoms of
horror in her mind, far more terrific than all that dreaming superstition
ever drew. Besides, there was frequently something so inconceivably
picturesque in the varying gestures of unrestrained passion, so
irresistibly comic in their sallies, or so heart-piercingly pathetic in
the little airs they would sing, frequently bursting out after an awful
silence, as to fascinate the attention, and amuse the fancy, while
torturing the soul. It was the uproar of the passions which she was
compelled to observe; and to mark the lucid beam of reason, like a light
trembling in a socket, or like the flash which divides the threatening
clouds of angry heaven only to display the horrors which darkness
shrouded.

Jemima would labour to beguile the tedious evenings, by describing the
persons and manners of the unfortunate beings, whose figures or voices
awoke sympathetic sorrow in Maria's bosom; and the stories she told were
the more interesting, for perpetually leaving room to conjecture
something extraordinary. Still Maria, accustomed to generalize her
observations, was led to conclude from all she heard, that it was a
vulgar error to suppose that people of abilities were the most apt to
lose the command of reason. On the contrary, from most of the instances
she could investigate, she thought it resulted, that the passions only
appeared strong and disproportioned, because the judgment was weak and
unexercised; and that they gaine