wrong in my head." Much practical science
was taught me by men whose business it was
to work stones, plants, and animals, in ways
useful to society. I ploughed the fields with
ploughmen; I reaped the sea with fishermen;
and I sailed far voyages and fought in the
Peninsula where I listened to the yarns of
sailors and soldiers. I admired everybody
and everything. As I gave such convincing
proofs of sound judgment, my friends
declared, generously and unanimously, I had
head enough to learn anything.

When about ten years of age, I was sent to
school once more; at twelve, I was dux of a class
of boys of fourteen; and at twenty, I gained
some of the highest honours of an university.

My college life did not, however, pass
away without a memorable return of my
hallucinations. On my first appearance at
an examination made annually with
antique solemnity, my vanity prompted me to
make a needless display of Latinity. For
months previously, I worked eighteen hours a
day; during the preceding fortnight I studied
day and night. When I was called up for public
examination by three professors in their robes,
and was seated in an immense old chair in
presence of a large audience of my fellow-students,
I felt my nerves giving way. The
sway of my ghostly mother asserted itself
once more. As I had the passage of Virgil
on which I happened to be examined, by
heart, I went on, at first mechanically and
fluently, until the letters began their old
capers — forking, bulging, shooting, flashing,
swerving the page, diminishing the type,
expanding the book— with clouding, flying,
mocking, menacing things between me and it
— and I made a dead stop. The examining
professor gave me the word I had lost. There
was a long pause. At last the professor
said:— "I am surprised;" and I replied:
"Si-si-sir, I can neither see nor hear." No one
laughed at me, if I may believe what I was
often assured. However, I have never read
a page of Horace or Virgil since I left college,
such was the bitterness of my youthful mortification.
Prior to my public humiliation, I
read Horace and Virgil for the pleasure they
gave me; but ever since I left college I have
never construed a page of a Latin classic;
my readers can judge whether in this respect
I am much like other folks, or am peculiarly
a weak and vain fellow. Moreover, my
juvenile disease of stammering, came back in
my trouble: a disease symptomatic of torn
or over-stimulated nerves. The affectionate
nursery theory of my stammering was, that I
was taking time to think what fib I would tell.

Thanks to my infantile experiences, I have
always had a profound sense of the fragility
of the human mind. This conviction is one
of the most salutary of all creeds.
Stammering, trembling, and hallucinated, I could
scarcely fail to begin life with a lively sense
of the fragility of my own faculties, at any
rate. Observation has not given me a
much better opinion of the solidity of other
folks, who never fell from scaffolds and were
not scared at nurse. "A strong-minded
woman once said: "Well, I do not think
there is anything would drive me mad."
A studious man answered, "Madam, you
might as well say there is no weight which
could break your back." I am of opinion,
after all I can observe in this world, that
there are no likelier subjects of insanity
than the like of her. As I find myself
becoming a grey mariner upon the sea of life,
I perceive a curious generalisation forcing
itself more and more upon my attention.
Youth and age, birth and death, appearances
and results, are more completely
contraries than is generally thought. I have seen
my very strong-minded acquaintance become
mad; the remarkably healthy folks who were
never ailing are dead; not a few of the very
devout, have turned out rogues and jades.

Stammering and ghosts are both curable
diseases. When I began this paper, of course,
the affatus was purely benevolent, and not in
the least gossippy, which inspired me to tell
everybody, how such evils may be incurred
and confirmed, mitigated and cured. There is
an alchemy which can transmute many of our
misfortunes into benefits. Stammering is the
insubordination of the pronunciation to the
volition, and is cured by all exercises which
regulate the pronunciation by the volition.
Scanning and reciting verses in the dead
languages implies habitual regulation of the
voice by the will, and cured me of the disease
of stammering.

I have quite cured myself of the ghost pest
by making ghosts. The study of the imagination
convinced me that the only way to lay the
ghosts I inherited, was by setting up a small
ghost factory of my own. Combating ghosts by
ghosts, the natural has gradually been replaced
by the manufactured article, and the spectres
which gave me pain have been chased away
by benign shades which give me pleasure.

The manufacture of my ghosts is easy and
simple. Wherever I reside I find out the
ancient residences of remarkable persons the
memory of whom is fitted to increase the
love of truth and justice. Portraits and
descriptions enable me to recall from the dark
of the past, the dead of distant days.
Whenever I visit the towns in which they
have lived, I call upon my ghosts more
assiduously than upon my friends. I see them
as they lived. Knowing from their writings
their thoughts, I freely discuss with them their
opinions. Laugh at me as you may, it is to the
device of voluntarily creating such good ghosts,
that I owe my emancipation from the hideous
phantoms which enslaved my childhood.