t if instead
of throbbing it should falter, flutter, and stop as if never to beat
again? You, young woman, who with ready belief and tender sympathy will
look upon these pages, if they are ever spread before you, know what it
is when your breast heaves with uncontrollable emotion and the grip of
the bodice seems unendurable as the embrace of the iron virgin of the
Inquisition. Think what it would be if the grasp were tightened so that
no breath of air could enter your panting chest!

Does your heart beat in the same way, young man, when your honored
friend, a venerable matron of seventy years, greets you with her kindly
smile as it does in the presence of youthful loveliness? When a pretty
child brings you her doll and looks into your eyes with artless grace
and trustful simplicity, does your pulse quicken, do you tremble, does
life palpitate through your whole being, as when the maiden of seventeen
meets your enamored sight in the glow of her rosebud beauty? Wonder
not, then, if the period of mystic attraction for you should be that
of agitation, terror, danger, to one in whom the natural current of the
instincts has had its course changed as that of a stream is changed by a
convulsion of nature, so that the impression which is new life to you is
death to him.

I am now twenty-five years old. I have reached the time of life which
I have dreamed, nay even ventured to hope, might be the limit of the
sentence which was pronounced upon me in my infancy. I can assign no
good reason for this anticipation. But in writing this paper I feel as
if I were preparing to begin a renewed existence. There is nothing for
me to be ashamed of in the story I have told. There is no man living who
would not have yielded to the sense of instantly impending death which
seized upon me under the conditions I have mentioned. Martyrs have gone
singing to their flaming shrouds, but never a man could hold his
breath long enough to kill himself; he must have rope or water, or some
mechanical help, or nature will make him draw in a breath of air, and
would make him do so though he knew the salvation of the human race
would be forfeited by that one gasp.

This paper may never reach the eye of any one afflicted in the same way
that I have been. It probably never will; but for all that, there are
many shy natures which will recognize tendencies in themselves in the
direction of my unhappy susceptibility. Others, to whom such weakness
seems inconceiva