My brain sickens, and my bosom labors to be delivered of the weight that presses upon it, yet my conscious pen shrinks from the avowal.  But out it must——­

O, Mr. Reflector! guess at the wretch’s misery who now writes this to you, when, with tears and burning blushes, he is obliged to confess that he has been—­HANGED——­

Methinks I hear an involuntary exclamation burst from you, as your imagination presents to you fearful images of your correspondent unknown—­hanged!

Fear not, Mr. Editor.  No disembodied spirit has the honor of addressing you.  I am flesh and blood, an unfortunate system of bones, muscles, sinews, arteries, like yourself.

Then, I presume, you mean to be pleasant.—­That expression of yours, Mr. Correspondent, must be taken somehow in a metaphorical sense——­

In the plainest sense, without trope or figure—­Yes, Mr. Editor! this neck of mine has felt the fatal noose,—­these hands have tremblingly held up the corroborative prayer-book,—­these lips have sucked the moisture of the last consolatory orange,—­this tongue has chanted the doleful cantata which no performer was ever called upon to repeat,—­this face has had the veiling nightcap drawn over it——­

But for no crime of mine.—­Far be it from me to arraign the justice of my country, which, though tardy, did at length recognize my innocence.  It is not for me to reflect upon judge or jury, now that eleven years have elapsed since the erroneous sentence was pronounced.  Men will always be fallible, and perhaps circumstances did appear at the time a little strong——­

Suffice it to say, that after hanging four minutes (as the spectators were pleased to compute it,—­a man that is being strangled, I know from experience, has altogether a different measure of time from his friends who are breathing leisurely about him,—­I suppose the minutes lengthen as time approaches eternity, in the same manner as the miles get longer as you travel northward),—­after hanging four minutes, according to the best calculation of the bystanders, a reprieve came, and I was CUT DOWN—­

Really I am ashamed of deforming your pages with these technical phrases—­if I knew how to express my meaning shorter—­

But to proceed.—­My first care after I had been brought to myself by the usual methods (those methods that are so interesting to the operator and his assistants, who are pretty numerous on such occasions,—­but which no patient was ever desirous of undergoing a second time for the benefit of science), my first care was to provide myself with an enormous stock or cravat to hide the place—­you understand me; my next care was to procure a residence as distant as possible from that part of the country where I had suffered.  For that reason I chose the metropolis, as the place where wounded honor (I had been told) could lurk with the least danger of exciting inquiry, and stigmatized innocence had the best chance of hiding her disgrace in a crowd.  I sought out a new circle of acquaintance, and my circumstances happily enabling me to pursue my fancy in that respect, I endeavored, by mingling in all the pleasures which the town affords, to efface the memory of what I had undergone.