"This sort of life was, however, too great and continued a strain for a rickety machine to last. And at times, when I gave way to those strange thoughts about the use and end of human existence, which crowd upon the mind in nervous disease--it seemed to me as if I could weigh and measure the particles of vitality from my daily diminishing store-- expended in each unnatural effort of labour--as if every stroke of my business craft represented so much of that daily shortening distance which lay between me and the end. I felt the price I was paying for the privilege of labour, and for its remuneration. But I thought, ever, of my wife and little babies, and the thought roused me to a kind of desperation, and made me feel for the time as if I could trample weakness under foot, and tear out, break in pieces, and cast away those miserable, oversensitive organs, which chained, cramped, and hindered me. I like work, too. And I had a sort of shame of confessing myself incapable. I morbidly derided the sympathising regret likely to be shown by my friends, and I pictured the moribund predictions likely to follow a temporary desertion of my post. "But the estates of my mortal realm stepped in again. "At the end of a time of hard, anxious, and difficult labours, I went down into the country on business, and was seized, in the streets of a little town, with violent palpitation, and with faintness. I had to take refuge in a shop; to resort to brandy, physic, and a doctor; and, at the close of a day's confinement to my room, to sneak back to London, as miserable as any poor dog, who, having run about all day with a tin kettle at his tail, is, at last, released, to go limping and exhausted home. "I struggled with this, too, and for some time would not 'give in.' But my face, now, would not answer to my will. It would look pale and miserable. My friends began to commiserate me. This was dreadful. So I at last yielded to the combined movement, of my own convictions of necessity, the wishes of my friends, the orders of my physician, and, most effective of all, the kind commands of one whom I deem it an honour, as it is a necessity, to obey in most things--I went away from business. I went away without hope. I did not expect cure. I believed functional derangement had become, at last, organic disease--and that my days were numbered. I tried the water cure, homoeopathy, allopathy-- everything. Some day, I must recount my consultations, on the same Sunday, with Sir James Clarke, Her Majesty's physician, and Dr. Quin, homoeopathist, jester, and, as some said, quack." At the end of five years of my suffering, I went to America. The trip did me good. It did not cure me. I wrote a book--a very little one. Half-a-crown was its price. The present First Lord of the Treasury, Mr. W. H. Smith, published it. All the edition was sold. I did not venture another. I will quote some portions of it, as a preface to what is to follow.