less. Yes! it brought balm and comfort to me to think
that none would need to blush at my relationship nor weep over my fate.
Sorrow has surely eaten deeply into our natures, when we derive pleasure
and peace from what in happier circumstances are the sources of regret.

Let me now hasten on. My reader will readily forgive me if I pass with
rapid steps over a portion of my story, the memory of which has not yet
lost its bitterness. The day at last came; and amid all the ceremonies
of a prison I was marched from my cell to the dock. How strange the
sudden revolution of feeling,--from the solitude and silence of a jail
to the crowded court, teeming with looks of eager curiosity, dread, or
perhaps compassion, all turned towards him, who himself, half forgetful
of his condition, gazes on the great mass in equal astonishment and
surprise!

My thoughts at once recurred to a former moment of my life, when I stood
accused among the Chouan prisoners before the tribunal of Paris. But
though the proceedings were less marked by excitement and passion, the
stern gravity of the English procedure was far more appalling; and in
the absence of all which could stir the spirit to any effort of its own,
it pressed with a more solemn dread on the mind of the prisoner.

I have said I would not linger over this part of my life. I could not
do so if I would. Real events, and the impressions they made upon
me,--facts, and the passing emotions of my mind,--are strangely confused
and commingled in my memory; and although certain minute and trivial
things are graven in my recollection, others of moment have escaped me
unrecorded.

The usual ceremonial went forward: the jury were impanelled, and the
clerk of the Crown read aloud the indictment, to which my plea of "Not
guilty" was at once recorded; then the judge asked if I were provided
with counsel, and hearing that I was not, appointed a junior barrister
to act for me, and the trial began.

I was not the first person who, accused of a crime of which he felt
innocent, yet was so overwhelmed by the statements of imputed guilt,--so
confused by the inextricable web of truth and falsehood, artfully
entangled.--that he actually doubted his own convictions when opposed to
views so strongly at variance with them.

The first emotion of the prisoner is a feeling of surprise to discover,
that one utterly a stranger--the lawyer he has perhaps never seen, whose
name he never so much as heard of--is per