living as might best please my fancy. This season shall decide my
fate. One more experiment, and I shall find myself restored to my place
among my fellow-beings, or, as I devoutly hope, in a sphere where all our
mortal infirmities are past and forgotten.

I have told the story of a blighted life without reserve, so that there
shall not remain any mystery or any dark suspicion connected with my
memory if I should be taken away unexpectedly. It has cost me an effort
to do it, but now that my life is on record I feel more reconciled to my
lot, with all its possibilities, and among these possibilities is a gleam
of a better future. I have been told by my advisers, some of them wise,
deeply instructed, and kind-hearted men, that such a life-destiny should
be related by the subject of it for the instruction of others, and
especially for the light it throws on certain peculiarities of human
character often wrongly interpreted as due to moral perversion, when they
are in reality the results of misdirected or reversed actions in some of
the closely connected nervous centres.

For myself I can truly say that I have very little morbid sensibility
left with reference to the destiny which has been allotted to me. I have
passed through different stages of feeling with reference to it, as I
have developed from infancy to manhood. At first it was mere blind
instinct about which I had no thought, living like other infants the life
of impressions without language to connect them in series. In my boyhood
I began to be deeply conscious of the infirmity which separated me from
those around me. In youth began that conflict of emotions and impulses
with the antagonistic influence of which I have already spoken, a
conflict which has never ceased, but to which I have necessarily become
to a certain degree accustomed; and against the dangers of which I have
learned to guard myself habitually. That is the meaning of my isolation.
You, young man,--if at any time your eyes shall look upon my melancholy
record,--you at least will understand me. Does not your heart throb, in
the presence of budding or blooming womanhood, sometimes as if it "were
ready to crack" with its own excess of strain? What if instead of
throbbing it should falter, flutter, and stop as if never to beat again?
You, young woman, who with ready belief and tender sympathy will look
upon these pages, if they are ever spread before you, know what it is
when your breast heaves with un