"If any one who may not just like an actual dissection, will look at one of Quain's 'Plates of the Bones, Muscles, and Nerves of the Human Body,' he will see that, growing as it were out of the walls of the stomach, there are, in our wonderful human machine, great bunches of nerves, called, by the medicals, the 'great ganglionic system,' and he will observe that these nerves are in intimate and inseparable connection with the spinal cord, and the brain. Then, if he recollects that a perpetual series of conversations and signals goes on by those agents between the stomach and the brain--that, in fact, the two are talking together every moment (without even the delay of that inappreciable interval for which the electric current lingers on the wires in its wondrous progress of intelligence)--he will see that he cannot abuse either great organ without a 'combination of parties' against his administration. "My unfortunate mistake, therefore, was this: I _overworked my brain_. It rebelled. Stomach joined the outbreak. Heart beat to the rescue; and all the other corporal powers sympathised in the attempt to put me down. They would not stand ten days' work a week, and no Sunday,--relieved though the labour might be by the amusement of speeches and leading articles. "The first explosion of the conspiracy laid me fainting at the desk. A sort of truce followed this. I consented for a few days to the terms of the belligerents. I rested. But resting, I was restless. Unfit to work, I was tormented by an unnatural desire for action. Thus I roused myself early--rode to the office (for I was too weak to walk), buried myself amidst my letters, reports and accounts--and rushed on with the day's duties as if all the work of the world had to be done in that one day, and that one day was the last. But an hour or two usually settled the contest. Head swam, heart beat, fluttered, stopped, struggled,--knees knocked together,--and out oozed that cold clammy sweat which reminds one of weakness and the grave. So with a pale face, anxious eye, and hollow cheek, I had to quit the desk again and ride mournfully home, the remainder of the day being consumed in a rest, which only increased my melancholy feelings, because it made me more than ever conscious of my feebleness and excitability.