So, after every affectionate care that a good wife could pay, I swallowed my narcotic pill--and slept, slept, slept--till, at eight in the morning, the sun was coming in, charmingly, through the windows. Nothing seemed to ail me. What weakness, what nonsense, said I. But I had promised to remain in bed till Mr. Smith came. But I sent down for my clerks, and at 11 a.m. I was in full activity, dictating to one man, listening to another, and giving orders to a third, in, as I thought, the fullest voice--when in came Mr. Smith. He looked round in doubt, and then went down stairs. I have only just forgiven him for that. For in a moment up came my wife. "Edward," she said, "Mr. Smith declares that if you do not give over at once, you will have brain fever." Oh! unwise Smith. The words were hardly out of my wife's mouth, when I felt I could do no more. Had the world been offered to me, I could have done no more. Alas! my _nerve_ was gone. At that tune I was working for a livelihood. Fortunate that it was so, otherwise a lunatic asylum, or a permanent state of what the doctors call hypochondriasis, might have followed. After some years of struggle with this nerve-demon, the child of overwork, I wrote, in 1850:-- "I am not fond of writing, and I know I must do it badly. Still I feel that the little narrative I am about to put together may do some good to some few people who may be suffering. I know that the roughest and dullest book ever written, had it contained a similar relation to this of mine, would have brought balm to my mind and hope to my heart not many years ago. And who knows but that other men (for the scenes of this world, and its good and evil, are very much alike), may be suffering as I did, and may therefore be influenced by my rude scribbling, as I might have been by some of theirs? "There was a time, and not a very distant one either, when I was utterly ignorant of two things--first, the existence, in my particular case, of the thing called the human stomach; and secondly, the reality of those mysterious telegraphic wires--yclept NERVES. Often nave I sneered at 'bilious subjects,' 'dyspepsia,' and that long string of woes which one hears of, in such luxuriance of description, usually over breakfast, at Clifton, Tonbridge, or Harrogate. Like the old Duchess of Marlborough, too, I used 'to thank God I was born before nerves came into fashion.'