been reached which has aroused your
sympathies--say, a reconciliation between the hero and heroine, after
long and painful misunderstanding. The feelings excited by this scene
are not of a kind from which you seek relief; but are, on the contrary,
a grateful relief from the painful feelings with which you have
witnessed the previous estrangement. Moreover, the sentiments these
fictitious personages have for the moment inspired you with, are not
such as would lead you to rejoice in any indignity offered to them; but
rather, such as would make you resent the indignity. And now, while you
are contemplating the reconciliation with a pleasurable sympathy, there
appears from behind the scenes a tame kid, which, having stared round at
the audience, walks up to the lovers and sniffs at them. You cannot help
joining in the roar which greets this _contretemps_. Inexplicable as is
this irresistible burst on the hypothesis of a pleasure in escaping from
mental restraint; or on the hypothesis of a pleasure from relative
increase of self-importance, when witnessing the humiliation of others;
it is readily explicable if we consider what, in such a case, must
become of the feeling that existed at the moment the incongruity arose.
A large mass of emotion had been produced; or, to speak in physiological
language, a large portion of the nervous system was in a state of
tension. There was also great expectation with respect to the further
evolution of the scene--a quantity of vague, nascent thought and
emotion, into which the existing quantity of thought and emotion was
about to pass.

Had there been no interruption, the body of new ideas and feelings next
excited would have sufficed to absorb the whole of the liberated nervous
energy. But now, this large amount of nervous energy, instead of being
allowed to expend itself in producing an equivalent amount of the new
thoughts and emotions which were nascent, is suddenly checked in its
flow. The channels along which the discharge was about to take place are
closed. The new channel opened--that afforded by the appearance and
proceedings of the kid--is a small one; the ideas and feelings suggested
are not numerous and massive enough to carry off the nervous energy to
be expended. The excess must therefore discharge itself in some other
direction; and in the way already explained, there results an efflux
through the motor nerves to various classes of the muscles, producing
the half-convulsive a