. Butts's
college-mates confessed that he had this infirmity. Stranger and far
more awkward than this is the case mentioned in an ancient collection,
where the subject of the antipathy fainted at the sight of any object of
a red color. There are sounds, also, which have strange effects on
some individuals. Among the obnoxious noises are the crumpling of silk
stuffs, the sound of sweeping, the croaking of frogs. The effects
in different cases have been spasms, a sense of strangling, profuse
sweating,--all showing a profound disturbance of the nervous system.

All these effects were produced by impressions on the organs of sense,
seemingly by direct agency on certain nerve centres. But there is
another series of cases in which the imagination plays a larger part
in the phenomena. Two notable examples are afforded in the lives of two
very distinguished personages.

Peter the Great was frightened, when an infant, by falling from a bridge
into the water. Long afterward, when he had reached manhood, this hardy
and resolute man was so affected by the sound of wheels rattling over a
bridge that he had to discipline himself by listening to the sound, in
spite of his dread of it, in order to overcome his antipathy. The story
told by Abbe Boileau of Pascal is very similar to that related of Peter.
As he was driving in his coach and four over the bridge at Neuilly,
his horses took fright and ran away, and the leaders broke from their
harness and sprang into the river, leaving the wheel-horses and the
carriage on the bridge. Ever after this fright it is said that Pascal
had the terrifying sense that he was just on the edge of an abyss, ready
to fall over.

What strange early impression was it which led a certain lady always to
shriek aloud if she ventured to enter a church, as it is recorded? The
old and simple way of accounting for it would be the scriptural one,
that it was an unclean spirit who dwelt in her, and who, when she
entered the holy place and brought her spiritual tenant into the
presence of the sacred symbols, "cried with a loud voice, and came out
of" her. A very singular case, the doctor himself had recorded, and
which the reader may accept as authentic, is the following: At the head
of the doctor's front stairs stood, and still stands, a tall clock, of
early date and stately presence. A middle-aged visitor, noticing it
as he entered the front door, remarked that he should feel a great
unwillingness to pass that c