the very time when it might do you some good. As I think it
reasonable that you will feel very badly some time between this and the
final consummation of your purpose, it is intended that you shall read
this just at such a time. Why I say it is reasonable that you will feel
very badly yet, is because of three special causes added to the general
one which I shall mention.

The general cause is, that you are naturally of a nervous temperament;
and this I say from what I have seen of you personally, and what you
have told me concerning your mother at various times, and concerning
your brother William at the time his wife died. The first special cause
is your exposure to bad weather on your journey, which my experience
clearly proves to be very severe on defective nerves. The second is the
absence of all business and conversation of friends, which might divert
your mind, give it occasional rest from the intensity of thought which
will sometimes wear the sweetest idea threadbare and turn it to the
bitterness of death. The third is the rapid and near approach of that
crisis on which all your thoughts and feelings concentrate.

If from all these causes you shall escape and go through triumphantly,
without another "twinge of the soul," I shall be most happily but most
egregiously deceived. If, on the contrary, you shall, as I expect you
will at sometime, be agonized and distressed, let me, who have some
reason to speak with judgment on such a subject, beseech you to ascribe
it to the causes I have mentioned, and not to some false and ruinous
suggestion of the Devil.

"But," you will say, "do not your causes apply to every one engaged in
a like undertaking?" By no means. The particular causes, to a greater
or less extent, perhaps do apply in all cases; but the general
one,--nervous debility, which is the key and conductor of all
the particular ones, and without which they would be utterly
harmless,--though it does pertain to you, does not pertain to one in a
thousand. It is out of this that the painful difference between you and
the mass of the world springs.

I know what the painful point with you is at all times when you are
unhappy; it is an apprehension that you do not love her as you should.
What nonsense! How came you to court her? Was it because you thought she
deserved it, and that you had given her reason to expect it? If it was
for that why did not the same reason make you court Ann Todd, and at
least twenty others