 delight which a young and unfledged mind receives
from ideas that give scope to all that imagination can picture of terrible or
sublime, I could not yet bring myself to consider Mr. Falkland's guilt as a
supposition attended with the remotest probability.
    I hope the reader will forgive me for dwelling thus long on preliminary
circumstances. I shall come soon enough to the story of my own misery. I have
already said that one of the motives which induced me to the penning of this
narrative was to console myself in my insupportable distress. I derive a
melancholy pleasure from dwelling upon the circumstances which imperceptibly
paved the way to my ruin. While I recollect or describe past scenes which
occurred in a more favourable period of my life, my attention is called off for
a short interval from the hopeless misfortune in which I am at present involved.
The man must indeed possess an uncommon portion of hardness of heart, who can
envy me so slight a relief. - To proceed.
    For some time after the explanation which had thus taken place between me
and Mr. Falkland, his melancholy, instead of being in the slightest degree
diminished by the lenient hand of time, went on perpetually to increase. His
fits of insanity, for such I must denominate them for want of a distinct
appellation, though it is possible they might not fall under the definition that
either the faculty or the court of chancery appropriate to that term, became
stronger and more durable than ever. It was no longer practicable wholly to
conceal them from the family and even from the neighbourhood. He would sometimes
without any previous notice absent himself from his house for two or three days,
unaccompanied by servant or attendant. This was the more extraordinary, as it
was well known that he paid no visits, nor kept up any sort of intercourse with
the gentlemen of the vicinity. But it was impossible that a man of Mr.
Falkland's distinction and fortune should long continue in such a practice
without its being discovered what was become of him, though a considerable part
of our county was among the wildest and most desolate districts that are to be
found in South Britain. Mr. Falkland was sometimes seen climbing among the
rocks, reclining motionless for hours together upon the edge of a precipice, or
lulled into a kind of nameless lethargy of despair by the dashing of the
torrents. He would remain for whole nights together under the naked cope of
heaven, inattentive to the consideration either of place or time, insensible to
the variations of the weather, or rather seeming to be delighted with that
uproar of the elements which partially called off his attention from
