hey tinkle and toll thus
every midnight, when my hour of penance arrives and I have tried to
register my story. It is almost finished now. Let me read the pages
softly to myself:

"My life has been a long career of suffering. The elements, whose
changes and combinations contribute to the pleasure of my species,
have arrayed themselves against me. I am fashioned so delicately that
the every-day bustle of the world provokes exquisite and incessant
pain. Embodied like my fellows, my nerves are yet sensitive beyond
girlishness, and my organs of sight, smell, and hearing are
marvellously acute. The inodorous elements are painfully odorous to
me. I can hear the subtlest processes in nature, and the densest
darkness is radiant with mysterious lights. My childhood was a
protracted horror, and the noises of a great city in which I lived
shattered and well-nigh crazed me. In the dead calms I shuddered at
the howling of winds. I fancied that I could detect the gliding
revolution of the earth, and hear the march of the moon in her
attendant orbit.

"My parents loved me tenderly, and, failing to soothe or conciliate
me, they removed from the busy city to a secluded villa in the
suburbs. Those labors which necessitated abrupt or prolonged sound
were performed outside our grounds. The domestics were enjoined to
conduct their operations with the utmost quietude. Carriages never
came to the threshold, but stopped at the lodge; the drives were
strewn with bark to drown the rattle of wheels; familiar fowls and
beasts were excluded; the pines were cut down, though they had moaned
for half a century; the angles of the house were rounded, that the
wind might not scream and sigh of midnight, and the flapping of a
shutter would have warranted the dismissal of the servants. Thick
carpets covered the floors. My apartments lay in a remote wing, and
were surrounded with double walls, filled with wool, to deaden
communication. Goodly books were provided, but none which could arouse
fears or passions. Fiery romances were prohibited, and histories of
turmoil and war, with theology and its mournful revelations, and
medicine, which revived the bitter story of my organism. My library
was stocked with dreamy and diverting compositions--old Walton, the
pensive angler; the vagaries of ancient Burton, and the placid
essayists of the Addisonian day. Of poets I had Cowper and Wordsworth,
who loved quiet life and were the chroniclers of domestic men and
ma