ence worth the trouble and fatigue of slavery to
the vulgar need of supplying the waste of the system and working at the
task of respiration like the daughters of Danaus,--toiling day and night
as the worn-out sailor labors at the pump of his sinking vessel?

Why did I not brave the risk of meeting squarely, and without regard to
any possible danger, some one of those fair maidens whose far-off smile,
whose graceful movements, at once attracted and agitated me? I can only
answer this question to the satisfaction of any really inquiring reader
by giving him the true interpretation of the singular phenomenon of which
I was the subject. For this I shall have to refer to a paper of which I
have made a copy, and which will be found included with this manuscript.
It is enough to say here, without entering into the explanation of the
fact, which will be found simple enough as seen by the light of modern
physiological science, that the "nervous disturbance" which the presence
of a woman in the flower of her age produced in my system was a sense of
impending death, sudden, overwhelming, unconquerable, appalling. It was
a reversed action of the nervous centres,--the opposite of that which
flushes the young lover's cheek and hurries his bounding pulses as he
comes into the presence of the object of his passion. No one who has
ever felt the sensation can have failed to recognize it as an imperative
summons, which commands instant and terrified submission.

It was at this period of my life that my father determined to try the
effect of travel and residence in different localities upon my bodily and
mental condition. I say bodily as well as mental, for I was too slender
for my height and subject to some nervous symptoms which were a cause of
anxiety. That the mind was largely concerned in these there was no
doubt, but the mutual interactions of mind and body are often too complex
to admit of satisfactory analysis. Each is in part cause and each also
in part effect.

We passed some years in Italy, chiefly in Rome, where I was placed in a
school conducted by priests, and where of course I met only those of my
own sex. There I had the opportunity of seeing the influences under
which certain young Catholics, destined for the priesthood, are led to
separate themselves from all communion with the sex associated in their
minds with the most subtle dangers to which the human soul can be
exposed. I became in some degree reconciled to the tho