a speedy return, but his assurance
that there was no immediate danger if I was careful did not afford me
unmixed pleasure. For my mother's sake and my own I desired to live, but
the rules he prescribed before my departure were so contradictory to
my nature that they seemed unbearably cruel. They restricted every
movement. He feared the haemorrhage far less than the tender feeling in
the soles of my feet and other small symptoms of the commencement of a
chronic disease.

Middendorf had taught us to recognize God's guidance in Nature and our
own lives, and how often I succeeded in doing so! But when I examined
myself and my condition closely it seemed as if what had befallen me was
the result of a malicious or blind chance.

Never before or since have I felt so crushed and destitute of support
as during those days, and in this mood I left the city where the spring
days of life had bloomed so richly for me, and returned home to my
mother. She had learned what had occurred, but the physician had assured
her that with my vigorous constitution I should regain my health if I
followed his directions.

CHAPTER XXIII. THE HARDEST TIME IN THE SCHOOL OF LIFE.

The period which now followed was the most terrible of my whole life.
Even the faithful love that surrounded me could do little to relieve it.

Medicines did not avail, and I had not yet found the arcanum which
afterwards so greatly benefitted my suffering soul.

The props which my mother and Middendorf had bestowed upon me when a boy
had fallen; and the feeling of convalescence, which gives the invalid's
life a sense of bliss the healthy person rarely knows, could not aid me,
for the disease increased with wonderful speed.

When autumn came I was so much worse that Geheimrath von Ammon, a
learned and experienced physician, recalled his advice that my mother
and I should spend the winter in the south. The journey would have been
fatal. The correctness of his judgment was proved by the short trip to
Berlin which I took with my mother, aided by my brother Martin, who was
then a physician studying with the famous clinical doctor Schonlein. It
was attended with cruel suffering and the most injurious results, but
it was necessary for me to return to my comfortable winter quarters. Our
old friend and family physician, who had come to Hosterwitz in September
to visit me, wished to have me near him, and in those days there was
probably no one who deserved more confidenc