Under certain circumstances, and especially in youth, the mind becomes abnormally sensitive to impressions of all kinds. Severe and long-continued study, a light diet, lack of exercise, and a superfluity of anxiety, had combined to bring my mental man into a condition somewhat resembling the ascetic ecstasy ascribed to the monks of old time--a condition in which the young men see visions and the old men dream dreams. In other words, I had overworked myself, and my health, never very robust, now seemed to run some risk of breaking down altogether. My brain was in a state of nervous exaltation; my hands were thin and tremulous; my nights were disturbed by strange dreams, and even by occasional somnambulism; and I no longer felt energy to undertake the long walks which had been my panacea for bodily ailments. It seemed likely that my university honours might turn out to have been bought at too high a price. My doctor, having felt my pulse, furnished me with the somewhat gratuitous information that what I needed was rest--rest absolute and persistent, bodily and mental: to dream beneath green trees; to linger by still waters; to forget that such things as books and knowledge existed; to think of nothing, and converse with nobody more stimulating than birds, beasts, country yokels, and speckled trout. Anything in the shape of newspapers, railways, days of the week or month, or, in fact, of time and civilisation in general, were to be entirely ignored. I was to establish a sort of rural eternity for myself, and to forget that such a thing as a nineteenth century had ever been born. I was wholly persuaded of the soundness of this advice; the trouble was, I had not 'go' enough left in me to follow it. I wanted somebody to give me a shove in the required direction. Unfortunately, I was almost alone in the world, and could think of no quarter whence the external impetus might be expected. I had made few intimate friends in the university, and none of a temperament at once idle and energetic enough to provide the sort of companionship I needed. I was an only child, and my widowed mother had died about a year previous, leaving me an empty house somewhere in the suburbs of London, a comfortable competence, and no relations that I could remember ever to have seen. I was as solitary in the midst of the populous earth as if I had changed places with the man in the moon. I was doing my situation less than justice, however. Just as I had begun to subside into I know not what sluggish depths of despondency, I received a letter which put a new face upon matters, and lent a fillip to my jaded mood such as awakened me to something like liveliness. The letter was from an uncle of mine, whose very existence had been almost mythical to me, for he was a recluse and an eccentric, who never went anywhere, and lived in an out-of-the-way place, where nobody ever went. As his communication was brief and to the point, I will give it here at full length: