r land and sea, driven by the sting of the
never-sleeping gadfly.

This was a delicate, interesting game that he played. Under one innocent
pretext or another, he invaded this or that special province she had
made her own. He would collect the themes and have them all read and
marked, answer all the puzzling questions in mathematics, make the other
teachers come to him for directions, and in this way gradually took upon
himself not only all the general superintendence that belonged to his
office, but stole away so many of the special duties which might fairly
have belonged to his assistant, that, before she knew it, she was
looking better and feeling more cheerful than for many and many a month
before.

When the nervous energy is depressed by any bodily cause, or
exhausted by overworking, there follow effects which have often
been misinterpreted by moralists, and especially by theologians. The
conscience itself becomes neuralgic, sometimes actually inflamed, so
that the least touch is agony. Of all liars and false accusers, a
sick conscience is the most inventive and indefatigable. The devoted
daughter, wife, mother, whose life has been given to unselfish labors,
who has filled a place which it seems to others only an angel would
make good, reproaches herself with incompetence and neglect of duty. The
humble Christian, who has been a model to others, calls himself a worm
of the dust on one page of his diary, and arraigns himself on the next
for coming short of the perfection of an archangel.

Conscience itself requires a conscience, or nothing can be more
unscrupulous. It told Saul that he did well in persecuting the
Christians. It has goaded countless multitudes of various creeds to
endless forms of self-torture. The cities of India are full of cripples
it has made. The hill-sides of Syria are riddled with holes, where
miserable hermits, whose lives it had palsied, lived and died like the
vermin they harbored. Our libraries are crammed with books written by
spiritual hypochondriacs, who inspected all their moral secretions
a dozen times a day. They are full of interest, but they should be
transferred from the shelf of the theologian to that of the medical man
who makes a study of insanity.

This was the state into which too much work and too much responsibility
were bringing Helen Darley, when the new master came and lifted so much
of the burden that was crushing her as must be removed before she could
have a chan