Stunned by this blow, which left me without the courage to solicit an explanation by letter, even if I had known where they were, (for the particular address was industriously concealed from me,) I waited with impatience the termination of the period, in the vain hope that I might be permitted to have a chance of softening the harsh decision by a personal interview with Celestina after her return.  But before three months were at an end, I learned from the newspapers that my beloved had——­given her hand to another.

Heart-broken as I was, I was totally at a loss to account for the strange step which she had taken; and it was not till some years after that I learned the true reason from a female relation of hers, to whom it seems Celestina had confessed in confidence, that it was no demerit of mine that had caused her to break off the match so abruptly, nor any preference which she might feel for any other person, for she preferred me (she was pleased to say) to all mankind; but when she came to lay the matter closer to her heart, she found that she never should be able to bear the sight—­(I give you her very words as they were detailed to me by her relation)—­the sight of a man in a nightcap who had appeared on a public platform—­it would lead to such a disagreeable association of ideas!  And to this punctilio I was sacrificed.

To pass over an infinite series of minor mortifications, to which this last and heaviest might well render me callous, behold me here, Mr. Editor! in the thirty-seventh year of my existence, (the twelfth, reckoning from my reanimation,) cut off from all respectable connections:  rejected by the fairer half of the community,—­who in my case alone seem to have laid aside the characteristic pity of their sex; punished because I was once punished unjustly:  suffering for no other reason than because I once had the misfortune to suffer without any cause at all.  In no other country, I think, but this, could a man have been subject to such a life-long persecution, when once his innocence had been clearly established.

Had I crawled forth a rescued victim from the rack in the horrible dungeons of the Inquisition,—­had I heaved myself up from a half bastinado in China, or been torn from the just-entering, ghastly impaling stake in Barbary,—­had I dropt alive from the knout in Russia, or come off with a gashed neck from the half-mortal, scarce-in-time-retracted cimeter of an executioneering slave in Turkey,—­I might have borne about the remnant of this frame (the mangled trophy of reprieved innocence) with credit to myself in any of those barbarous countries.  No scorn, at least, would have mingled with the pity (small as it might be) with which what was left of me would have been surveyed.