n me, I might be
tempted, unless restrained by a strong moral influence, to commit a
crime which might not be forgiven.

"I have great weakness in the throat, and soreness in the chest, with a
dull pain between the shoulders. My appetite is extraordinary;--I think
it has increased since I have dieted. My flesh is stationary. I gain a
few pounds, and then commit some wild freak and lose it. I am
unaccountable to myself. I think, sir, that my mental disturbances
impair my health.

"I anticipate much pleasure from seeing you; for I see, by your letter,
you understand me. I have always been thought inexplicable. I feel a
universal languor. I am, at times, unconscious. I feel dead to all
things; there seems a loss of all vitality; and sometimes there is a
sense of suffocation. All these feelings are extreme, because I am, by
my nature, so sensitive. I met the other day with a slight from a
friend, a young lady, which caused grief so excessive that I have ever
since been suffering from influenza."

These lengthy extracts may not be very interesting to the general
reader, except so far as they reveal to him some of the internal
cogitations of a soul borne down with a load of suffering, which almost
drove her to suicide. "Who hath woe,"--as Solomon says, with respect to
a very different description of human character,--if not this poor
widow?

And yet it required a personal visit, and the conversation of a couple
of hours, to fathom the depths of her woe, to the utmost. For there are
secrets of the human heart, with which, of course, no stranger--not even
the family physician--should presume to intermeddle; though to these
depths, in the case of the half-insane sufferer of whom I am speaking,
it was not necessary that I should go, in order to find out what I had
all along suspected. Disease had been communicated several years before,
of a kind which was much more communicable _then_, than it was
eradicable now.

Whenever, by the laws of hereditary descent, in their application to
health and disease, our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren
suffer, we may recognize in it the hand of the great Creator; nor do we
doubt, often, the wisdom of such laws nor their ultimate tendency to
work out final good. But when we find a widow suffering many long years,
from a disease to which a husband's weakness and wickedness has
subjected her, what shall we say, especially when we have reason to fear
that the evils in questio