m I seem to hold to the human race as it were by
a single filament. My father, who was my instructor, my companion,
my dearest and best friend through all my later youth and my earlier
manhood, died three years ago and left me my own master, with the means
of living as might best please my fancy. This season shall decide my
fate. One more experiment, and I shall find myself restored to my place
among my fellow-beings, or, as I devoutly hope, in a sphere where all
our mortal infirmities are past and forgotten.

I have told the story of a blighted life without reserve, so that there
shall not remain any mystery or any dark suspicion connected with my
memory if I should be taken away unexpectedly. It has cost me an effort
to do it, but now that my life is on record I feel more reconciled to
my lot, with all its possibilities, and among these possibilities is a
gleam of a better future. I have been told by my advisers, some of them
wise, deeply instructed, and kind-hearted men, that such a life-destiny
should be related by the subject of it for the instruction of others,
and especially for the light it throws on certain peculiarities of human
character often wrongly interpreted as due to moral perversion, when
they are in reality the results of misdirected or reversed actions in
some of the closely connected nervous centres.

For myself I can truly say that I have very little morbid sensibility
left with reference to the destiny which has been allotted to me. I have
passed through different stages of feeling with reference to it, as
I have developed from infancy to manhood. At first it was mere blind
instinct about which I had no thought, living like other infants the
life of impressions without language to connect them in series. In my
boyhood I began to be deeply conscious of the infirmity which separated
me from those around me. In youth began that conflict of emotions and
impulses with the antagonistic influence of which I have already spoken,
a conflict which has never ceased, but to which I have necessarily
become to a certain degree accustomed; and against the dangers of which
I have learned to guard myself habitually. That is the meaning of my
isolation. You, young man,--if at any time your eyes shall look upon my
melancholy record,--you at least will understand me. Does not your heart
throb, in the presence of budding or blooming womanhood, sometimes as if
it "were ready to crack" with its own excess of strain? Wha