me near the Malouine Islands, the sixty-eighth degree of latitude kept me a prisoner in its sea of ice at the South Pole; I passed two consecutive days and nights on board the Esmerelda, between fire and inundation; and if I were to extract the quintessence of the agonies experienced upon these three occasions it could never equal the intense torture I suffer at the Poste-Restante.  Three seals broken, three letters opened, three overwhelming disappointments!  Nothing! nothing! nothing!  Oh miserable synonym of despair!  Oh cruel type of death!  Why do you appear before me each day as if to warn my foolish heart that all hope is dead!  Then how dreary and empty to me is this cold, unfeeling world we move in!  I feel oppressed by the weight of my sorrowful yearning that hourly grows more unbearable and more hopeless; my lungs seem filled with leaden air, and all the blood in my heart stands still.  In thinking of the time that must be dragged through till this same hour to-morrow, I feel neither the strength nor courage to endure it with its intolerable succession of eternal minutes.  How can I bridge over this gulf of twenty-four hours that divides to-day from to-morrow?  How false are all the ancient and modern allegories, invented to afflict man with the knowledge that his days are rapidly passing away!  How foolish is that wisdom that mourns over our fugitive years as being nothing but a few short minutes!  I would give all my fortune to be able to write the Hora Fugit of the poet, and offer for the first time to man these two words as an axiom of immutable truth.

There is nothing absolutely true in all the writings of the sages.  Figures even, in their inexorable and systematic order, have their errors just as often as do words and apothems.  An hour of pain and an hour of pleasure have no resemblance to each other save on the dial. My hours are weary years.

You understand then, my dear Edgar, that I write you these long letters, not to please you, but to relieve my own mind.  In writing to you I divert my attention from painful contemplation, and expatriate my ideas.  A pen is the only instrument capable of killing time when time wishes to kill us.  A pen is the faithless auxiliary of thought; unknown to us it sometimes penetrates the secret recesses of our hearts, where we flattered ourselves the horizon of our sorrows was hid from the world.

Thus, if you discover in my letter any symptoms of mournful gayety, you may know they are purely pen-fancies.  I have no connection with them except that my fingers guide the pen.