I sat thinking, not sadly, but seriously, of the past, and of that present time that was so soon to add itself to the Past; for the Future, I felt, by sensations that never deceive, it must be brief! My malady gained rapidly on me; symptoms, I was told to guard against, had already shewn themselves, and I knew that the battle was fought and lost. “It is sad to die at thirty,” saith Balzac, somewhere; and to the Frenchman of Paris, who feels that death is the cessation of a round of pleasures and dissipations, whose hold is hourly stronger; who thinks that life and self-indulgence are synonymous; whose ideal is the ceaseless round of exciting sensations that spring from every form of human passion nurtured to excess;--to him, the sleep of the grave is the solitude and not the repose of the tomb. To me, almost alone in the world, to die suggests few sorrows or regrets; without family, without friends, save those the world’s complaisance calls such; with no direct object for exertion, nothing for hope or fear to cling to; no ambition that I could nourish, no dream of greatness or distinction to elevate me above the thought of daily suffering; life is a mere monotony--and the monotony of _waiting_. While watching the progress of my malady, seeing day by day the advancing steps of the disease that never sleeps, I recognise in myself a strange adaptation in my mind and feelings to the more developed condition of my illness. At first, my cough irritated and fevered me. It awoke me if I slept--it worried me as I read; my fast and hurried breathing, too, exciting the heart’s action, rendered me impatient and discontented. Now, both these symptoms are in excess, and yet, by habit and some acquired power of conforming to them, I am scarcely aware of their existence. I have learned to look on them as my normal, natural condition. My cough on awaking in the morning--my hectic as night falls--only tell of the day’s dawn and decline. I fancy that this dreamy calm, this spirit of submissive waiting that I feel, is dependent on my infirmity; for how otherwise could I, if strong in mind and body, endure the thraldom of my present life? The watchful egotism of sickness demands the mind of sickness.