t learning without which sagacity is like a traveller
with a good horse, but who cannot read the directions on the guideboards.
He was not a man to be taken in by names. He well knew that oftentimes
very innocent-sounding words mean very grave disorders; that all, degrees
of disease and disorder are frequently confounded under the same term;
that "run down" may stand for a fatigue of mind or body from which a week
or a month of rest will completely restore the over-worked patient, or an
advanced stage of a mortal illness; that "seedy" may signify the
morning's state of feeling, after an evening's over-indulgence, which
calls for a glass of soda-water and a cup of coffee, or a dangerous
malady which will pack off the subject of it, at the shortest notice, to
the south of France. He knew too well that what is spoken lightly of as
a "nervous disturbance" may imply that the whole machinery of life is in
a deranged condition, and that every individual organ would groan aloud
if it had any other language than the terrible inarticulate one of pain
by which to communicate with the consciousness.

When, therefore, Dr. Butts heard the word antipatia he did not smile, and
say to himself that this was an idle whim, a foolish fancy, which the
young man had got into his head. Neither was he satisfied to set down
everything to the account of insanity, plausible as that supposition
might seem. He was prepared to believe in some exceptional, perhaps
anomalous, form of exaggerated sensibility, relating to what class of
objects he could not at present conjecture, but which was as vital to the
subject of it as the insulating arrangement to a piece of electrical
machinery. With this feeling he began to look into the history of
antipathies as recorded in all the books and journals on which he could
lay his hands.

------------------------------

The holder of the Portfolio asks leave to close it for a brief interval.
He wishes to say a few words to his readers, before offering them some
verses which have no connection with the narrative now in progress.

If one could have before him a set of photographs taken annually,
representing the same person as he or she appeared for thirty or forty or
fifty years, it would be interesting to watch the gradual changes of
aspect from the age of twenty, or even of thirty or forty, to that of
threescore and ten. The face might be an uninteresting one; still, as
sharing the inevitable changes wrou