"
So, after every affectionate care that a good wife could pay, I
swallowed my narcotic pill--and slept, slept, slept--till, at eight in
the morning, the sun was coming in, charmingly, through the windows.
Nothing seemed to ail me. What weakness, what nonsense, said I. But I
had promised to remain in bed till Mr. Smith came. But I sent down for
my clerks, and at 11 a.m. I was in full activity, dictating to one man,
listening to another, and giving orders to a third, in, as I thought,
the fullest voice--when in came Mr. Smith. He looked round in doubt,
and then went down stairs. I have only just forgiven him for that. 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.
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