although I was
on the water almost daily, I never had the slightest accident. I am
over sixty now. Had I been a nervous man, I would probably have
suffered much from my apprehensions of danger. Tell that to Miss
Talbot for her comfort.'

"He walked back to school with us, and while he waited for Miss Hill
to be summoned, Elsie went up-stairs to get her book. When she came
down there was the queerest expression on her face I ever saw. 'I
have made _such_ a mistake!' she said, in an embarrassed way. 'I can
never forgive myself for it. I mistook one line for another, and the
one in Tim's hand means something entirely different from what I
thought it did. That poor little soul has been suffering all this time
solely on account of my ignorance!'

"Doctor Phelps smiled. 'When I was a lad,' he said, 'there was a
couplet in my grammar that I often had to parse, which ran in this
wise:

"'A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring!'"

"Tim's father came to-day. Doctor Phelps telegraphed for him
immediately after leaving here yesterday, and they have taken her away
to a sanitarium. Doctor Phelps said that she was not able to stand the
long journey home, and that her nervous condition was so serious that
she must have immediate attention.

"Elsie is inconsolable, although Doctor Phelps assures her that Tim
would undoubtedly have broken down before the close of the year, from
the mere strain of school life; she is such a delicate little thing."

"Just a month to-day since Tim left. It will be a full year before she
is well and strong again, Doctor Phelps says, and maybe longer. He was
invited to speak in the chapel, this morning, and I wish you could
have heard what he said on the influence of the imagination. He told
some comical stories of patients he had had, who could imagine
themselves possessed of a new disease every week.

"Then he spoke of clairvoyants, and mediums, and fortune-tellers of
every kind. 'It is one of the kindest provisions of Providence,' he
added, 'that we are allowed to see only one minute at a time. Suppose
that we could look ahead into the years, and see some terrible
calamity coming upon us, with the deadly certainty that every
nightfall was bringing it one step nearer. What an agony of
apprehension we would be in as the month approached--then the week,
the day, and finally the hour! What man could stand the strain of such
prolonged torture?