 turn to stone, and was tranquil enough as far as any feelings connected with love for Mr. Cartwright were concerned; but religious terrors, frightful, hideous, almost maddening, took possession of me. I believed that the crime I had committed in loving the man whom Heaven had ordained to be my spiritual teacher, was a deadly sin. I now felt certain—or, in the language of the sect, an inward assurance, that I was pre-doomed to eternal perdition; and that the belief I had once entertained, exactly contrary to this, was of itself a sin never to be atoned, and only to be punished by eternal flames. Is there another torture of the mind equal to this? I do not think it; for true and reasonable remorse for crimes really committed cannot approach it. Not all the sins that man ever laid upon his soul could equal in atrocity what my guilt seemed to me. I suppose I was mad, quite mad; for as I now recall the hours that passed over me, and all the horrid images of the avenging fury of an angry God which entered and rested upon my spirit, I can call the state I was in nothing short of madness.

"This state lasted, with little variation in the amount of suffering, during the first week after my mother's marriage; and then its feverish violence gave place to sullen, heavy gloom. The cure however was near, very near me, for I found it in Mr. Cartwright himself.

"It was some trifling instance of contemptible artifice which first drew aside the veil from my mental vision, and caused me to see Mr. Cartwright, not as he is—oh no! that has been a work of steady study, and some length of time,—but as something of a very different species from that to which I had fancied he belonged.

"One must have been under a delusion as complete as mine has been, to conceive the sensation produced by once more seeing things as they are. I can compare it only to walking out of a region peopled with phantoms and shadows into a world filled with sober, solid realities. It is the phantom world which produces the strongest effect on the imagination; and the first effect of the change was to make everything around me seem most earthly dull, stale, and unprofitable. I was still, however, a fanatic; I still deemed myself one of those foredoomed to eternal destruction. But one blessed day, some time after I had become convinced that Mr. Cartwright was a very pitiful scoundrel, I chanced to hear him in sweet
