tamp of sanity, the clear consciousness
of shattered faculties. His feebleness was as patent to himself as to
others. He knew that he was the mere wreck of what he had once been, and
he knew further that his mental and bodily ruin was due to the triumph
of tyranny and injustice. Still, he was, for the moment, happy. There
was sunshine in his heart, and gladness in his eye. Having crossed the
Niagara river, he knew that he was beyond the material grasp of those
whose baneful shadow was nevertheless destined to darken the rest of his
life. "I thanked God," he writes, several years afterwards, "as I set my
first foot on the American shore, that I trod on a land of freedom. The
flow of animal spirits carried me along for more than two miles in
triumphant disgust. It carried me beyond my strength, till, staggering
by the side of the road, I sunk down, almost lifeless, among the bushes,
and awoke from my dream to a state of sensibility and horror past all
power of description. If at my trial, and so long after it, I was
callous to feeling; if I was blind to objects around me, and regardless
of consequences, the scenes I had passed through were now too visible:
my senses were too keen; my feelings too acute. Before, all was frozen
and rigid; now, extreme relaxation resigned me to the torture of a
distracted mind, feeble, doubting, and irresolute. In fact, my nervous
system had undergone a most violent change; and, to this hour, the
effects are permanent: to this hour, with every effort and every
appliance, my natural tone of health and vigour cannot be regained."[19]

One of the bitterest reflections which forced itself upon him was that
he, a man of unimpeachable loyalty, had been banished--"flung out like a
spoilt jelly,"[20] under a statute which had been passed to guard
against the machinations of aliens and traitors. "Banishment" was to him
a word replete with repulsive and disgraceful associations. He liked it
no better than did the sweet rose of the Capulets.

"Banished: that one word--_banished_.

* * * * *

There is no end, no limit, measure, bound,
In that word's death."

* * * * *

On the 27th of August, precisely a week after the trial above described,
a high and mighty English nobleman who was for the time domiciled in
Canada underwent a more terrible experience than ever fell to the lot of
Robert Gourlay. He was travelling at the time th