I Tried To
Thank Her By Making Light Of My Many Miseries.
"This sort of life was, however, too great and continued a strain for a
rickety machine to last.
And at times, when I gave way to those strange
thoughts about the use and end of human existence, which crowd upon the
mind in nervous disease - it seemed to me as if I could weigh and
measure the particles of vitality from my daily diminishing store -
expended in each unnatural effort of labour - as if every stroke of my
business craft represented so much of that daily shortening distance
which lay between me and the end. I felt the price I was paying for the
privilege of labour, and for its remuneration. But I thought, ever, of
my wife and little babies, and the thought roused me to a kind of
desperation, and made me feel for the time as if I could trample
weakness under foot, and tear out, break in pieces, and cast away those
miserable, oversensitive organs, which chained, cramped, and hindered
me. I like work, too. And I had a sort of shame of confessing myself
incapable. I morbidly derided the sympathising regret likely to be
shown by my friends, and I pictured the moribund predictions likely to
follow a temporary desertion of my post.
"But the estates of my mortal realm stepped in again.
"At the end of a time of hard, anxious, and difficult labours, I went
down into the country on business, and was seized, in the streets of a
little town, with violent palpitation, and with faintness.
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