University of Virginia Library

22. CHAPTER XXII.

They saved poor Middleton, but Elizabeth was gone
forever. They put her into the green earth; he was
very ill at the time, but he crept out of his bed and
crawled to the window, and held his breath, and saw
them bury her in the little garden. He spoke not a
word, not a tear fell from his eyes, not a moan from
his lips. But when it was all over, when he saw them
pile up the turf upon her broken heart, he uttered a
word or two that sounded like prayer, and turned
away from the window and was carried off to bed.
He was in great peril; and so was I. We both had
a narrow escape; for my own part, I was like a man
overboard, upheld by terror in the midst of the sea till
the hand of rescue is near, and sinking with joy just
when it is ready to clutch him.

But for the following paper which was found on the
floor he would not have been alive at the end of another
week. Till he read it, he was literally dying
before my face; from that hour he was another man;
there was a dreadful anxiety in his look, he was continually
questioning all that came near about the sky
and the weather, the moon, the stars, and the day of
the month, panting with such eagerness the while for
nourishment and life! He would count his pulse by
the hour, and look at his wasted body, and crawl to
the window and lift himself up, and gasp there, day
after day, and all day long, at the cold sea-breeze,
with a look of such vehement, almost ferocious delight;

counting every blow of the clock, and every beat of
his overcharged heart, with such frightful steadiness,
that we could not bear to look at him. The paper
was in the hand-writing of Elizabeth, I have the original
before me now, and I shall copy it for you.

“They will try to persuade you, Gerard Middleton,
that I am crazy. Do not believe them dear.” I give
her own words—“Do not believe them dear: I am not.
I have been so, it is true, but I am well now, and
happy. I have escaped, and I am no longer afraid of
them. Crazy! am I? Well, well; but who made
me so dear? who made me so?

“It is now day-break. I have hardly shut my eyes
all the night through. No, no, I will not survive it,
and why should I? But I will make you suffer as no
mortal ever suffered before, Gerard, for having laid
waste the heart of woman.

“My forehead was in the dust before you, and you
would not even look at me. O, Gerard, if you had
but looked up when I stood before—

“My plan is now matured. Your first wife I would
have yielded to—but she refused—and now who is
there to deny my claim? I will not be diverted from
it, nor discouraged nor betrayed; for I trust nobody.
Weeks may go by, months, years perhaps—whole
years, but I have sworn to do it—sworn by the grave
of my poor old grandfather, by the spirit of my wronged
mother, by the love that I bore you when we were
happy and innocent; and what I have sworn to do,
that will I do.

“Another day has gone by, and I have no hope left;
you know that I am here, you know that I am regarded
as a stranger unworthy to associate even in the

House of the Lord with the untempted and the virtuous—and
yet you will neither speak to me, nor see me,
nor write to me.

“You shall be rewarded for this dear, and rewarded
in a way that shall not be forgotten by you, nor by one
of your proud father's house. You have doubted
my love; you shall doubt it no longer. You have
doubted my faith; you shall never doubt it again.
You have doubted my courage. Lo! I mean to give to
you such an example of courage, that if you survive to
tell of it, the hearts of them that hear you shall quake,
and their very blood shall tremble. You have doubted
my perseverance. Look at the date of this: call to
mind if you are stout enough, the day when you saw
me last; on that very day, I took the resolution, a
record of which you see here. Gerard Middleton lay
your hand upon your heart and answer me. What
man ever thought so long, or so steadily of death?
Yet I have only began to prepare; the night has worn
away, and it is but a moment ago that I entered
solemnly upon the execution of my plan. All the
previous time, every hour, since we parted, I have
passed in the work of preparation. Shall I not go on
as I have begun? shall I waver? will my heart betray
me or fail me? No! no! There is that in me
which cannot be moved. And so assured do I feel of
this, and so well do I know the steadiness of my nature,
that I look now, and have looked for years, upon
whatever I have once resolved to do, as already done.

“My death-bed is before me. I see my winding-sheet
in the hands of the women. I see them tremble and
weep. I see a man going out into the green-wood

yonder, with a spade; I see him looking for a spot
where the four highways meet, as plainly as I saw you
proud, unfeeling, wretched man, a few days ago. I
can see a troop of shadows about a newly-made grave;
by and by, I shall hear the clods rattling upon the
coffin of a self-murderess. Hark!—there! there!—
did I not say so! But you did not hear them—you
do not hear them; you will not, you dare not; you
are asleep in the bosom of a wanton. Awake, Gerard,
awake! awake to the call of thy young bride! To
the cry of the deep sea, Gerard, from which they rescued
her.

“Another and another day! The work may be slow
in the consummation, but of a truth, my dear husband,
—your Indian bride has abandoned you to me, and
shall I not claim you?—it shall not be the less fatal
nor certain. It shall be paid scrupulously, the debt
I owe, scrupulously, to the uttermost farthing. Oh,
Gerard! oh! that I should now be driven to this! that
you, so good and so great as you had power to be,
should have done outrage to a creature's love, a creature
that loved you, O, merciful heaven! Lord God
of the faithful in heart! with a love, how infinitely
superior to all the bad love, dear, of all the bad women
that you ever bowed the knee to!

You may like to know the truth about your mortal
enemy. You shall be gratified. Jeffry Smith loved
me at the same time you did; but you were of a quick
rash temper, and I durst not suffer you to know the
truth. He loves me yet—married though he is to another
woman; he loves me, I do believe, more than
you ever yet loved me, though not so much as I love
you now, and I love you much less now than I did,

when we first went to sleep in each other's arms—when
I thought you all truth, and I was, as you know all
faith. He loves me yet, I say, though he knows that
I regard myself as your wife, and though he knows
that I know him to be a married man, but much as he
loves me, he would sacrifice me, I am sure, to obtain a
small triumph over you. Fool! fool! he has taught
me to play the game of death—his game, to retaliate.
He would make me his dupe! Fool, fool! I say again!
if I be the dupe of another, I shall not be his dupe.
I may counterfeit now, as bravely as he did, or as you
did, when you set fire to my heart. Let him quake.
The day of retribution is near for him, and for you,
and for both of you. You are both to be overwhelmed,
overwhelmed in your stateliness by the power of a
crushed, a broken-hearted silly girl, who but the other
day ran wild among the flowers, without fear of reproach,
and spoke what her heart prompted, although
she knew from her poor dead mother how wicked and
foolish it was for a young girl to speak the truth.

And as for you, Jeffry Smith, you shall be the high
Priest at the sacrifice of your own awful pride. I
know you, and another shall know you, even the husband
of my heart, and you shall do the homage of a
slave about the marriage-bed of your rival. You are
to be the grooms-man, proud sir, not the groom of your
beloved, at the most tremendous bridal that ever was
heard of on earth. Sleep if you can, after that bridal
is over!

“As for you dear Gerard—my betrayer—my betrothed—my
husband! I would let you sleep after my
death, if I could, but how can I? You will never
sleep again, after the night of our bridal—after the

consummation that I look to. You may shut your
eyes, you may dream, perhaps, but you will never
sleep more.

“You were continually with Martha P—, what
business had you there? You were married to another—your
Indian wife. Oh, Gerard! that one you
had married—even as you married her, should be able
to give you up to another as she does to me! You
loved the woman that I saw you with four nights ago:
How could you love her, when you knew that I was
alive? You were jealous of me; you betrayed me,
and because I lacked faith in you after you had betrayed
me, you had no faith in me, and you withdrew
your love when I prayed you to marry me and you
mocked at me when I told you, that if it would make you
love me the more, I would try to accomplish myself, to
become altogether a woman of the world—forsake my
doating mother, my poor old grandfather, come out
from the solitary place where you had buried me,
journey back to the sea-shore, and live, and move,
and breathe, and act, as other women do—any thing
dear, so that you would but love me, as I love you.

“Have you forgotten my words, when I saw that you
did not believe me? the words that I spoke in my great
sorrow? Did I not say—Gerard—I tell you the truth;
I speak nothing but the truth. I can do this; and I
will do it; I am all ready for the work now. But
dear Gerard—if you desert me, if you will not make
me your wife, if you have no longer faith in me, beware!
If you enter the path of guilt or scorn—so
sure as I have the nature that you have stirred up
within me, so sure will I outstrip you in that path!
If you are good, I shall be better, if you are bad I

shall be worse. Did I not say so to you, before we
parted? Jeffry Smith knew this: I told him of it
the very day before you left me; I did not love him,
but I felt assured in my own soul that if you ever deserted
me or failed me, it was upon his haughty bosom
I should perish. There was a disconsolate, sincere,
deep tenderness in his look when he heard me say
that I had still some hope of you, and that I did not
believe you would go away forever.

“Well. That night, you know when it was Gerard—
when you affronted my pure love, when you repeated
to me that I was not your wife, and that I never should
be your wife: when you doubted my truth and would
not believe that I was to you what I was, and what I
should have been to this day, but for your cruel
treachery. You were my husband, Gerard Middleton—my
true and lawful husband!—in the sight of
Him that you worship, or pretend to worship, and I
was your wife, as much as I could be, for I had married
you according to the faith of a heart overflowing
with unutterable love—the purest and warmest love—it
was the night of our everlasting farewell, Gerard. A
sudden giddiness, a heavy darkness fell upon me, when
I saw that of a truth, you did not love me so much as I
loved you, that you did not love me sufficiently to
abide with me in the sweet solitude, nor enough to let
me abide with you by the sea shore—I fainted when
you left me—itwas the first time in my life. But when
I awoke as it w ere from sudden death, my pride arose.
And yet I fainted again and again before I could resolve
what to do—yea, dropped upon the earth while
I was trying to stand up and laugh at the misery which
you had intended to afflict me with. Need I say more?

If you were able to desert me, why should I not be
able to give you up? If you were not my husband,
why should I continue to be your wife?

“The wrath of my heart would not suffer me to sleep
again. Perhaps they speak true, it may be that I was
a little out of my head. For I thought of my broken
hearted mother—of the friends of my youth—of that
fearful escape from the sea.—O, that I had perished
there! Merciful Father! for what am I reserved!—
My brain was a fire—that I knew—and my blood
smoked, that I could feel, whenever I drew my breath.
I can feel it now. I hated you; I hated myself—I
hated every thing alive. And so I gave myself up on
the very spot where you forsook me, to perdition.

“Gerard Middleton awake! Do you understand
what I say? Let me leave no doubt on your soul—
no comfort for you, no refuge for your pride. If I
do, the work will not be half completed. Hear me.
Know the truth. At the very time while you were on
your way to the bed of a harlot, the ruin of your wife
—your wife in the sight of your Maker—your own
young faithful wife, was accomplished. Yet more,
much more—do not believe that I was won as you
won me, or cheated or betrayed, or taken by surprise,
or carried away by love, or destroyed while I was faint
or feeble, or bowed down with sorrow. I was not. I
scorn every concealment, every subterfuge; I would
leave you no such hope, no such miserable consolation.
Hear the truth. I sacrificed myself deliberately to a
man I did not love. And why? Lo, the answer—
Husband of my youth!—It was to avenge myself on
you!

“I never did love him. I never could love him. He
was almost hateful to me, for I knew that you were
jealous of him, and I had begun to fear that your
jealousy and not your pride of birth, your foolish
pride in the purity of your blood, which, if a swarthy
brow be the sign with you, and with your haughty
race, cannot be so pure as mine, was the real and true
cause of your abandonment, first of your Indian wife
and then of me. Yet afraid as I was of him, and
hateful as he had begun to be to me, as all men were
alike to me, and as I no longer loved anybody else
better, I gave myself up to him without reserve. Do
you understand me now? But why did I this? That
you might hear the story one day or other and die, as
I knew I should, of a broken heart.

“Another week has worn away. Would you know
the whole truth? You shall. I repented. I was
ready to cast away my own life—but a something held
me back. I had begun to pray a little time before according
to my ancient faith, and my poor dear mother
appeared to me in my sleep and comforted me, but
when I awoke I was filled with an awful fear—and so
I went to her grave and told her what I had done;
but she rebuked me and drove me away, and would
not suffer me to be received there. But, by and by,
she took pity upon me, and fell upon my neck and
wept, and tried to persuade me that I was not altogether
to blame. But she did not succeed, and I still
thought of death as a refuge. I was cruelly beset by
the evil one, but supported by her, I withstood him,
though my poor heart was like dust and ashes. I never
knew what it was to be warm after that—before
I had never known what it was to be cold. The very

sunshine chilled me—the light I was afraid of; and
for a long while I breathed an atmosphere of smoke
that scorched and suffocated me without affording me
one atom of warmth. Yet was I more resolute and
high than ever, more undaunted than ever, when I
stood face to face with the Destroyer; with him, who
profited of my desolation, and grief and delirium; to
dishonor you. But one day as we sat together in the
shadow of the very tree where you found me, after a
separation of two whole years, I saw something in the
steely stern quiet of his large eyes, and all over his
broad square forehead, which—O, that you had been
there!—it filled me with bitterness and wrath. And
what was it, after all? Nothing dear—nothing but a
look of half-smothered exultation over you, not over
me. We were speaking of you, and I spoke of you
without so much as a quiver of the lip; but nevertheless
I could not forgive that look—I did not—I never
shall. Strange, very strange it may appear, but I never
shall, much as I hated you. I had well nigh been
the death of him for it, and I should have struck him
with a knife that lay near me, had I not thought of
something better. Fool! fool! he took the credit of
my overthrow to himself. I saw it—I saw it in the
deep thoughtful shadow of his brow, in the very gentleness
and gravity of his proud look, in the savage
glimmering of his averted eyes, while the tone of his
rich full voice was like the sound of a flute in my
ear; in the convulsive motion of his lip, half-writhing,
half-smiling, in the deep awful abstraction which followed
every cry of endearment, and every attempt
he made to soothe me; but he had no power to soothe
me, and he knew it. He humble you! he! I felt
another snake swiftly uncoiling at my heart when I
saw this. I shall feed that snake with his blood.

“O, that the hour I long for were at hand! O, that
you could see my heart naked before you—and the
angel of death at my side! Well, well—after this he
would have married me, dear, not as you married me,
but as they marry among the world's people. But I
refused, and the better to prove how much more I
loved you, I told him with a smile—with a smile dear
—that he should never approach me again. I have
kept my word.

“What else? They grew afraid of me, they conspired
to carry me off; they made a prisoner of me,
and persuaded my own old grandfather that I had
gone distracted, and that nothing would cure me but
the guardianship of one who had loved my mother,
and who being about to return with her husband to a
city on the sea shore—to this very city Gerard, offered
to take me with her: I consented; for I had so much
to learn—I labored night and day to accomplish myself,
as you used to term it when you appeared most
to feel my deficiences—I was talked of as a prodigy;
all that our best educated women do, I did, and more.
And so they imprisoned me—but I escaped. I saw
you, though you did not see me; and I saw Jeffrey,
though I would not suffer him to see me; and I heard
that you, although you passed the chief part of your
life in the society of bad women, had still found leisure
to betray his wife even as he had betrayed yours;
that you had encountered each other, and that both
of you were well nigh left on the field. I could not
bear this—I pitied him too much—and as I could not

you, I saw him again stretched upon what promised
to be the bed of death. But he recovered, and I withdrew.
He mistook my pity and my solicitude for
love; it was not love and I told him so, but he would
not believe me, he could not, even though he saw me
adhere to my promise, the promise I made with a
smile.

“By and by he laid another plan to mortify you. He
brought your Indian wife to me, and persuaded me to
play upon your new favorite with her help—he wanted
me to personate her, but I refused—I saw through
his object, and my wrath revived. It was for me to
meet you without preparation or notice on your part
before the woman you were now devoted to, the loved
beautiful widow. Overcome with your love for me,
you were to throw yourself into my arms—you!—
and be put away for him. How you escaped, you
know—would that I knew! He was only a step or
two off, and ready to appear, when I stood, before
you, and you refused to see me. My arms! the arms
of a creature whose heart was already darkened with
his wicked breath, degenerate with his familiarity!
You know the result, proud man. He was there to
see you rejected for him before a crowd; to see you
repulsed by a wanton before the eyes of her that you
were then hoping to marry. But you behaved as you
ought, and you turned away at my approach; and
would not hearken to the voice that gave you up forever—the
voice of your Indian wife, and I was the
prouder of you for it, although it destroyed, blighted,
crushed forever and ever, the last hope I had on
earth—even the last—the hope of being able to prove
that I was worthy of you.

“How little he knew me! I had resolved before we
saw you, whatever might happen, however you might
look or behave, to repel your tenderness, but while I
did so, to acknowledge my love not for another, not
for him, but for you, the bridegroom of my youth, to
acknowledge it aloud, before his face and before hers,
and then, before the multitude that were assembled
there to give him up to justice; for the avenger of
blood was near, and a signal from me would have been
the death of a murderer.

“You defeated my plan; you defeated hers; you
defeated his. You set us all at nought—and how,
dear, how!—so that your Indian wife was comforted
in her bereavement, so that he fell back abashed before
you, and plunged into the darkness and escaped
ere I could get my breath.

“Now hear me. Watch me. Look steadily at my
plan. See what I have written, day by day since that
evening; see what I shall write day by day, till—till
I am your dead wife, Gerard Middleton. Read it all
over, and see if there by any trick in it, or subterfuge,
or insincerity. See if I be not very clear and unequivocal,
and see it I depart from the path I am now
going to mark out, as on a map. Could you have
done as much? you—or any other man? or any other
woman that ever breathed? Such things have been
thought of, and talked of, heretofore, but who has ever
done what, when you are reading this, I shall have
done? People have destroyed themselves in a fit of
sorrow, in a moment of despair, in a frenzy. But
whoever died as I shall die—shall die!—as I have
died, when you are reading this! Gerard! my earliest,
my only love, my husband! my spirit is before

you, I am looking into your face, into your eyes, into
the very depths of your heart—both are full of tears,
like star-light and rain. A little more, love—a few
days more, and both shall be dust and water.

“You are a profligate, You have thrown me off.
Wherefore hearken you to the decree. Elizabeth
your wife, shall once more lie in your bosom; and
you shall never know the truth, till you find yourself
embracing a dead body. Such is my plan. See if I
do not bring it about. Watch me. But how shall I
do this? I have thought much of the mode, more
than you would believe, I dare say. Drowning would
be very well, and easy enough, and pleasant enough;
I should like to die in that way, to leap overboard at
sea, and go down to the depths of the sea before your
face. But if I were to do so, you would follow me,
and bring me back to life, or perish with me; and
there would be no time for you to know the truth, or
to read what I am now writing for you. We might
go to the bottom of the sea, in each other's arms, out
of a little ship loaded with green boughs and cheerful
flowers, but I am no longer worthy of such a death,
and you—O, of what death are you and such as you
now worthy?

“I might employ a pistol. I do not want courage; I
do not care about the mode, now that I have determined
upon death—but I should not leave any sort of
loathing or abhorence, my beloved in your recollection
of me. I would only fill your heart brimful of
sweet sorrow and love—nothing more. I would encompass
you for life with an element of rock, with
coldness and with outward desolation forever. And

why? only that you may feel the unutterable warmth
of my love the more.

“I have thought of poison. But poison would either
deprive me of my senses, or throw me into convulsion,
or put me to death slowly, or in some other way defeat
my purpose, or enable you to foresee it; such a
poison as you have here, the poison that puts you to
sleep, I mean. But I have prepared for this, and you
shall be the survivor. I shall take a preparation, the
virtue of which I know. It is the blood of a strange
herb, that herb from which the copper-snake draws
her poison. That shall do. While you are embracing
me dear, death shall be at work through all my
veins and arteries. You shall yet live, to lavish your
endearment, your caresses, your passionate love upon
a dead body; you shall yet strain a corpse to your
heart in the convulsion of your joy.

“Ho! to the marriage festival. The bride is ready;
the groom is ready—the grooms-man! Your mortal
foe, Death, and the Enemy of man! God will have it
so.

“You have laid waste whatever you came near, day
after day; revelled in the young hearts of women that
worshipped you, overshadowing their purity forever;
rifled the innocent year after year; wrought mischief
with us 'till we are tired of waiting for your overthrow,
offered sacrilege to the angels of the earth, 'till
they that know you have no faith in the goodness or
truth of woman. For all which, it is appointed unto
you, sinning as you have sinned, Gerard Middleton,
to suffer as no man ever yet suffered.

“Farewell, dear, farewell! If the preacher spoke

true, we are never to meet again, dear, never—never
—never! throughout all the ages of eternity, never!
It may be so—I neither believe nor disbelieve now;
but of this I am sure, that there will be a sweetness
and a consolation through all the torment which is
prepared for me—for Elizabeth, your wife, in the
knowledge; for of that our Father, as you call him,
if he is our Father, will not deprive me, that your last
kisses were upon my mouth, your last endearment lavished
upon me, your last embrace of the heart mine.
It shall be so.

“You will never dare to repeat your bridal. You
will never risk the death of another innocent, by
touching the red lips of a live woman with lips that
have clung to the white lips of the dead. You will
not risk the sight of another corpse at your side, after
a night of unspeakable tenderness and joy. No—no—
no! You and I are now remarried forever and ever;
and, it may be, separated forever and ever, in the
same hour. It is too late now for a third marriage—
is it not, my husband? How you may bear the blow
it is not for me to say; but as for me, much as I love
you, I shall endure the separation better than the
nuptials.

“The day has arrived—the hour—I am waiting for
you; I hear your voice below—I hear every word you
say; you have no suspicion of the truth, you mistake
me for another. I must leave this where you will be
sure to find it. Farewell! farewell forever, my beloved
friend—my lord, my husband! farewell forever.

ELIZABETH.

Upon the outside of this packet was written the following
words with a pencil. It is too dark for me to
see what the simpleton has added here. Her blood
be upon her own head! her death at his door! crazy
or not, faithful or not, I am weary of this. I know
the plan; I have watched her day by day; I have read
every line of this, night after night, while she was
dreaming that I was afar off, or in another world. I
have no patience left. I would strike a light and read
what she has just written—poor fool!—but who cares
what she may have written? Her death be at his
door! Let him suffer! I wash my hands of it.
Wife for wife Gerard Middleton such were your bitter
words when you lay stretched out on the grass at
my feet. Wife for wife! I say to you now! and I
have nothing more to say, till we meet again hereafter.”

JEFFRY SMITH.

And so they buried her. It was in the dead of winter
when I recovered so far as to be able to go abroad.
All the great earth was covered with snow. I went
over to see her grave. The ground was white every
where, but in that one spot. I was terrified when I
saw this—awestruck, and I know not well what my
notion was, but I shook and thought of the man-slayer
of the self-murderess, and of the unquenchable fire. I
was afraid to go near the grave at first. It really did
seem to me as if our Father Jehovah would not allow
the hiding place of the poor creature to be concealed.
Barrenness—that I had come prepared to see, that
was there; and absolute, everlasting death was enthroned
upon it forever; but I was not prepared to
see what I did see, the very grass about the grave

scorched as with fire and shrivelled to dust, and
through the innumerable fissures of the parched earth
cold as it was, a vapor continually stealing up and
overspreading the spot like a thin, white smoke, and
all about the roots of the old apple tree, underneath
which they had put her, a perceptible agitation of the
loose earth, as if it were all alive. Yes—yes—thought
I, the ban of the Almighty is at work here. You
pity me perhaps; you wonder at my folly. But you
forget sir, how forgetfully familiar I had grown with
incredible things. You forget how near I was to being
a man-slayer myself; you forget how near I was
to seeing a murder perpetrated before my very face—
the murder of a woman: for nothing has been heard
from that hour to this, concerning the people of the
cottage. And before you deal harshly with me, I
should pray you to consider how prone we are, when
terribly afflicted, to put faith in what we deride when
we are happy and cheerful.

I forgot in my surprize, that new fallen snow will
not lie upon the loosened earth; and that there is a
visible commotion in the soil, as if reptiles were at
work in it, or every grain alive, when the frost breaks
up. I stood and prayed in my heart, when I perceived
the truth; and prayed fervently that our dear
father above, the Great Spirit of the sky, would permit
the violet and the daisy, and the long bright grass
to gush up out of the earth before me, even though
they should help to overshadow and make beautiful
the refuge of a self-murderess. And I well nigh wept
aloud (so weak and so childish had sorrow and sickness
made me) when I thought how I should suffer (I pray
you to believe what I say) should I ever happen to

loiter forth in the sweet summer-time and find her
grave wholly bare and bleak, and parched and desolate
amid the soft green beauty and rich blossoming
and colored herbage of that neighborhood.

But why tell you more? I did not believe when I
began, that I could ever tell you half so much; I dare
not tell you more. And I have only to say now, that
Gerard Middleton is no longer what he was. You
have seen him—you saw the change in his look; and
you will understand the nature of it, when I tell you
that, great as it was, it took place in a single night,
and that great as the outward change was, it was nothing
to the inward change that accompanied it.
Farewell.

ATHERTON GAGE.

Such was the story; and I have now given it word
for word from the narrative, changing nothing but the
form of the dialogue, and leaving a few blanks where
he desired me.

A. G.

January 26th, 1827.