For
in a moment up came my wife. "Edward," she said, "Mr. Smith declares
that if you do not give over at once, you will have brain fever." Oh!
unwise Smith. The words were hardly out of my wife's mouth, when I felt
I could do no more. Had the world been offered to me, I could have done
no more.
Alas! my nerve was gone.
At that tune I was working for a livelihood. Fortunate that it was so,
otherwise a lunatic asylum, or a permanent state of what the doctors
call hypochondriasis, might have followed.
After some years of struggle with this nerve-demon, the child of
overwork, I wrote, in 1850: -
"I am not fond of writing, and I know I must do it badly. Still I feel
that the little narrative I am about to put together may do some good
to some few people who may be suffering. I know that the roughest and
dullest book ever written, had it contained a similar relation to this
of mine, would have brought balm to my mind and hope to my heart not
many years ago. And who knows but that other men (for the scenes of
this world, and its good and evil, are very much alike), may be
suffering as I did, and may therefore be influenced by my rude
scribbling, as I might have been by some of theirs?
