hunger are like brakes upon the car;
they stop the dire momentum of grief, and insure that if misery will
again drive us furiously, she must lash winded steeds anew. But what
force should stay a disembodied sorrow, which unbreathed by period or
alternation of despair, should be rapt onward in the whirlwind and the
hurricane, gathering eternally a fresh impetus of woe? Let us rail at
the body for its weakness if we will, but prize it also for its
restraint of the distracted mind. In the worst hour of my dejection it
was the body which called the lost reason home. I became hungry and ate,
hardly knowing what I did; I slept exhaustion away; and after many hours
awoke with clearer eyes, grateful to the weak flesh, and ready in its
company to face life once more, a defeated but not a desperate man. I
was glad to be thus reminded that the body could play this helpful part,
and my gratitude for its timely rescue taught me in after days to endure
its tyranny with a better grace. In the interlude between despair and
new effort, I once more turned a dispassionate gaze upon myself, as upon
some abandoned slave of a drug; and maintaining an attitude of
half-amused detachment, sought by a diagnosis of my case to establish
the real causes of my failure to lead a normal life.

At the outset I would make it clear that for me the only shyness that
counts, is that which is so deeply ingrained, as to have outlasted
youth. It may, indeed, be physically related to that transient
bashfulness which haunts so many of us in our younger days only to
vanish at maturity, swift as the belated ghost at cockcrow. But unlike
this common accident of growth, it is no surface-defect, but an inward
stain which dyes the very fibres of the being. It may, indeed, be
somewhat bleached and diminished by a timely and skilful treatment, but
is become too much a part of life to be ever wholly washed away. And the
unhappy step-children of nature whose inheritance it is, seldom find a
deliverer good at need; for as the world draws no distinction between
their grave affliction and that other remediable misery of youth, it
will sanction no other treatment than banter or mockery, which does but
infuse yet more deeply the mournful dye. When this fails, it leaves its
victims to the desolation which according to its judgment they have
wilfully chosen; for the most part ignoring their existence, but often
chastising them with scorpion-stings of disdain. Yet the subjects of