ilfulness, and more from simple ignorance of the rules of the
game. There are so many rules that no one will ever know them all, but
it seems that we live in a world of laws, and that if we transgress
those laws by ever so little, we must suffer equally, whether our
transgression is a mistake or not, and whether we happen to be saints or
sinners. There are laws also which have to do with the recovery of poise
and balance when these have been lost. These laws are less well observed
and understood than those which determine our downfall.

The more gross illnesses, from accident, contagion, and malignancy, we
need not consider here, but only those intangible injuries that disable
people who are relatively sound in the physical sense. It is true that
nervous troubles may cause physical complications and that physical
disease very often coexists with nervous illness, but it is better for
us now to make an artificial separation. Just what happens in the human
economy when a "nervous breakdown" comes, nobody seems to know, but mind
and body cooeperate to make the patient miserable and helpless. It may
be nature's way of holding us up and preventing further injury. The
hold-up is severe, usually, and becomes in itself a thing to be managed.

The rules we have wittingly or unwittingly broken are often unknown to
us, but they exist in the All-Wise Providence, and we may guess by our
own suffering how far we have overstepped them. If a man runs into a
door in the dark, we know all about that,--the case is simple,--but if
he runs overtime at his office and hastens to be rich with the result of
a nervous dyspepsia--that is a mystery. Here is a girl who "came out"
last year. She was apparently strong and her mother was ambitious for
her social progress. That meant four nights a week for several months at
dances and dinners, getting home at 3 A.M. or later. It was gay and
delightful while it lasted, but it could not last, and the girl went to
pieces suddenly; her back gave out because it was not strong enough to
stand the dancing and the long-continued physical strain. The nerves
gave out because she did not give her faculties time to rest, and
perhaps because of a love affair that supervened. The result was a year
of invalidism, and then, because the rules of recovery were not
understood, several years more of convalescence. Such common rules
should be well enough understood, but they are broken everywhere by the
wisest people.

Th