I return now to the point in my story where I digressed. The 14th of April, 1896, is recorded in my calendar as a happy day. The 15th started with a balmy spring morning full of glorious sunshine. The suggestion to walk through Central Park to Columbia College to my morning lecture could not be resisted, and I reached the lecture-room full of the joy of life which fills the heart of every healthy youth. My students told me later that the first part of my lecture that morning displayed that joy. But, near the end of the lecture, I suddenly collapsed. A sudden chill struck me like a bolt from a clear sky. Five days later my life hung in the balance; there was a desperate struggle between a stout heart and the busy poisons of dreaded pneumonia. The heart won out. But when the crisis had passed, and my physician thought that I was sufficiently strong to stand the shock of terrible news, he told me that my wife had died several days before, a victim of dreaded pneumonia. She had caught the seed of this merciless disease while nursing me. My weakened heart stood the shock, but every one of my nerves seemed to snap in two. For the first time in my life I recognized the full meaning of will-power; I recognized it because I knew that the spiritual motor, the power of which I had always felt, was there no longer. For the first time since leaving my native Idvor, twenty-six years before, I had to be steered and looked after by others. Life never looked so hopeless as it did during that awful spring of 1896. But I wanted to live, because I had a little daughter to bring up. That, in fact, was the only thing that I wanted to live for; everything else seemed either devoid of interest, or much beyond my reach. It is an awful thing to lose one’s self-reliance. Aims and aspirations appeared to me like little toy balloons that children play with; our nerves, I thought, are the strings which keep them afloat within the reach of our vision. When these strings snap in two, our aims and aspirations, like toy balloons, disappear rapidly into thin air.