she will drop down dead some
day in the street. Is one of her breasts somewhat sore, which, too, is
not unusual? She knows at once it is a cancer, and suffers an agony of
terror from a cause wholly imaginary.

Vibrating between a distressing excitement and a gloomy depression, her
temper gives way; and even the words of the Divine Master lose their
influence over her. She becomes fretful, and yet full of remorse for
yielding to her peevishness; she seeks for sympathy, without being able
to give reasons for needing it; she annoys those around her by
groundless fears, and is angered when they show their annoyance. In
fine, she is utterly wretched, without any obvious cause of
wretchedness.

This is a dark picture, but it is a true one--inexorably true. Let us
hasten to add that such a mental condition is, however, neither a
necessary nor a frequent concomitant of the change. We depict it, so
that friends and relatives may better appreciate the sufferings of a
class too little understood, and so that women themselves, by knowing
the cause of such complaints, and the sad results which flow from them,
may make the more earnest efforts to avoid them.

Other symptoms are, a sense of choking, a feeling of faintness, shooting
pains in the back and loins, creepings and chilliness, a feeling as if a
hand were applied to the back or the cheek, a fidgety restlessness,
inability to fix the mind on reading or in following a discourse, and a
loss of control over the emotions, so that she is easily affected to
tears or to laughter. All these merely indicate that nature is employing
all her powers to bring about that mysterious transformation in the
economy by which she deprives the one sex for ever of partaking in the
creative act after a certain age, while she only diminishes the power of
the other.

EFFECTS ON THE CHARACTER.

The effects on the character of this 'grand climacteric' are often
marked. Not unfrequently the woman becomes more masculine in thought and
habit, as has been admirably described by Dr. Tilt:--'There are almost
always while the change is progressing various forms of nervous
irritability and some amount of confusion and bewilderment, which seem
to deprive women of the mental endowments to which they had acquired a
good title by forty years' enjoyment. They often lose confidence in
themselves, are unable to manage domestic or other business, and are
more likely to be imposed on either within or without the