in a foreign land? Has she not left her country, her
relations, her friends, her gods, for me, whom she has raised to
opulence? Cease, cease--I cannot stand these thoughts--there is a strife
in this heart between the powers of hell and heaven--when will it
terminate, and who shall rule my destiny?"

These words, which he accompanied with wild gestures, were followed by
his usual indistinct muttering and jabbering. I directed my gaze upon
his wife. She sat in the chair, motionless, with her eyes fixed on the
ground as if she had been struck with death in that position, and been
stiffened into a rigidity which retained her in her place. The issues
of her tenderness and affection seemed to have been sent back upon the
heart, whose pulses they stopped. The killing pain of an ingratitude,
ingeniously heightened to the highest grade of that hell-king of all
human crimes, operating upon a mind rendered so sensitively susceptible
of its influences, paralyzed the whole moral constitution of the devoted
creature, and realized the poetical creation of despair. I felt inclined
to soften the sternness of her grief, by quickening her disbelief of the
raving thoughts of a fever-maniac; but I paused as I thought of the
probable necessity of her suspicion for her future safety from the
schemes of a murderer, whose evil desires might be resuscitated by the
return of health. I could do nothing more at that time for the dreadful
condition of the wretched husband, and less for the more dreadful state
of the miserable wife; and the personal pain I experienced in witnessing
this high-wrought scene of terror, forced me to depart, leaving the one
still raving in his madness, and the other bound in the stern grasp of
the most awful of all moral visitations.

I expected that on my next visit I would find such a change on my
patient as would enable me to decide whether he would live or die; but
he was still delirious, with the crowded thoughts of the events of his
past life careering through his fevered brain, as if their restlessness
and agitation were produced by the burning fires that chased them from
their legitimate territory of the mind. There was, however, a change
in one quarter. His wife's confidence and affection had withstood and
triumphed over the attack of the previous day, and she was again
occupied in hanging over her raving husband, shedding on his unconscious
face the tear of pity, and supplying, by anticipation, every want that