y own nerves:

"Not one sitteth still--no, not one!"

That men have any patience with what they term "feminine fidgetiness,"
is but an evidence that they are better Christians than we of the
gentler sex are willing to admit. For I think I am not making a
sweeping assertion when I state that not one tolerably healthy man in
five hundred knows what it is to have nerves such as are the
birthright of his mother, sister, and wife. And yet how well the
physician, poet, autocrat and professor, Oliver Wendell Holmes, knows
and sympathizes with this weakness in us! He touches the truth in a
direct way that wrings a sigh of familiar pain from many a patient
soul.

"Some people have a scale of your whole nervous system and can play
all the gamut of your sensibilities in semi-tones, touching the naked
nerve-pulps as a pianist strikes the keys of his instrument. I am
satisfied that there are as great masters of this nerve-playing as
Vieuxtemps or Thalberg in their lines of performance. Married life is
the school in which the most accomplished artists in this department
are found. A delicate woman is the best instrument; she has such a
magnificent compass of sensibilities. From the deep inward moan which
follows pressure on the great nerves of right, to the sharp cry as the
filaments of taste are struck with a crashing sweep, is a range which
no other instrument possesses."

And again he speaks of the less serious affection of the nerves
as: ... "Not fear, but what I call nervousness,--unreasoning, but
irresistible; as when, for instance, one, looking at the sun going
down, says: 'I will count fifty before it disappears,' and as he goes
on and it becomes doubtful whether he will reach the number, he gets
strangely flurried, and his imagination pictures life and death and
heaven and hell as the issues depending on the completion or
non-completion of the fifty he is counting."

If a man can describe it all so well, what could a woman do? I fear
that her description would be too graphic to be read by us, her
sisters.

Many people have a way of saying of a sufferer:

"There is nothing the matter with her. She is only excessively
nervous."

This "only" is a very serious matter. There is no illness more
difficult to treat and more trying to bear than nervous prostration.
It is a slowly advancing malady which is scarcely recognized as
serious by one's friends until the tired mind succumbs and mental
aberration is the terrible fi