[CHAPTER III.]
SHEPPARD LEE IS VISITED BY NEW FRIENDS, RELEASED FROM PRISON, AND CARRIED TO HIS NEW PLACE OF ABODE.
Another service that the attorney did me, according to the jailer, through whom I discovered all these things, was to despatch a messenger to my friends in Philadelphia, with the news of my insanity and imprisonment, and a request that they should send proper persons to take charge of me after being liberated: and I was roused the following morning by the appearance of some half a dozen kinsmen who had come to the village for that purpose, fully persuaded that they should find me a raging lunatic.
But the jailer's information had set me to reflecting upon my difficulties, all of which, as I clearly perceived, were owing to my indiscretion in attempting to keep up the character of Sheppard Lee while in another man's body. I saw the necessity I was now placed under to be Mr. John H. Higginson, and nobody else, for the future; and so I resolved to be—for I did not like the idea of being clapped into a mad-house by my new friends.
Yet they took me so much by surprise that I was guilty of some few inconsistencies; for it was not immediately that I felt myself at case in my new character.
The truth is, my situation was peculiar and embarrassing. With the body of Mr. Higginson, I had acquired all his distinctive peculiarities, as I mentioned before. But many of these were in a manner stupified within me, and required to be renewed, or resuscitated, by processes of association. I was like a man who has been roused from a lethargy, which had destroyed or obscured his memory, though not his instincts; and who betrays complete ignorance of past events, and forgetfulness of old friends, until some accidental circumstance—a casual reference to some past event, the tone of a voice, or other such cause—recalls him, it may be, to sudden and complete, though usually imperfect, consciousness.
Thus, when I was roused up in the morning, and beheld a good-looking personage of about my own years shaking me by the shoulder, I regarded him only as some impertinent stranger intruding upon my privacy, saluted him with divers epithets expressive of rage and indignation, and concluded by asking him "who the devil he was?"
"What! I?" said he, with the most doleful visage in the world; "why, Timothy—that is, Tim Doolittle, your brother-in-law—Don't you know me?"