But, besides, I could not bring myself to disclose a secret which would fill my hearer with consternation and make fear and unnatural horror the inmates of his breast.

I checked, therefore, my impatient thirst for sympathy and was silent when I would have given the world to have confided the fatal secret.

Yet, still, words like those I have recorded would burst uncontrollably from me.

I could offer no explanation of them, but their truth in part relieved the burden of my mysterious woe.

Upon this occasion my father said, with an expression of unbounded wonder, "My dearest Victor, what infatuation is this?
My dear son, I entreat you never to make such an assertion again." "I am not mad," I cried energetically; "the sun and the heavens, who have viewed my operations, can bear witness of my truth.