lock. He could not go near one of those tall
timepieces without a profound agitation, which he dreaded to undergo.
This very singular idiosyncrasy he attributed to a fright when he was an
infant in the arms of his nurse.

She was standing near one of those tall clocks, when the cord which
supported one of its heavy leaden weights broke, and the weight came
crashing down to the bottom of the case. Some effect must have been
produced upon the pulpy nerve centres from which they never recovered.
Why should not this happen, when we know that a sudden mental shock
may be the cause of insanity? The doctor remembered the verse of "The
Ancient Mariner:"

"I moved my lips; the pilot shrieked
And fell down in a fit;
The holy hermit raised his eyes
And prayed where he did sit.
I took the oars; the pilot's boy,
Who now doth crazy go,
Laughed loud and long, and all the while
His eyes went to and fro."

This is only poetry, it is true, but the poet borrowed the description
from nature, and the records of our asylums could furnish many cases
where insanity was caused by a sudden fright.

More than this, hardly a year passes that we do not read of some
person, a child commonly, killed outright by terror,--scared to death,
literally. Sad cases they often are, in which, nothing but a surprise
being intended, the shock has instantly arrested the movements on which
life depends. If a mere instantaneous impression can produce effects
like these, such an impression might of course be followed by
consequences less fatal or formidable, but yet serious in their nature.
If here and there a person is killed, as if by lightning, by a sudden
startling sight or sound, there must be more numerous cases in which
a terrible shock is produced by similar apparently insignificant
causes,--a shock which falls short of overthrowing the reason and does
not destroy life, yet leaves a lasting effect upon the subject of it.

This point, then, was settled in the mind of Dr. Butts, namely, that,
as a violent emotion caused by a sudden shock can kill or craze a human
being, there is no perversion of the faculties, no prejudice, no change
of taste or temper, no eccentricity, no antipathy, which such a cause
may not rationally account for. He would not be surprised, he said to
himself, to find that some early alarm, like that which was experienced
by Peter the Great or that which happened to Pascal, had broken some
spring in this youn