Out of this hard training, of this undue repression, and as a natural consequence too of the incessant cupping and bleeding, practised on the former generation as a remedy for all existent and non-existent maladies, there came forth another, debilitated, unnerved, an easy prey to the whole host of nervous disorders lying in wait for it. I have lived through and looked on at every phase of the transformation. Healthy as I was, I should hardly have escaped the drastic measures to which the so-called plethoric were subjected, had it not been sufficiently proved that their application had been injurious rather than beneficial to my mother. The immense strides made by medical science of recent years, make it difficult to judge rightly the mental attitude of those, who in their impatience of the inanity and futility of orthodox treatment, seem formerly to have welcomed and blindly followed the advice of every quack, calling himself a mesmeriser. We should be slower to condemn them, had we also suffered from the ignorance and incompetence of the regular practitioner, and perhaps be equally willing to sign a pact with the Evil One and his agents, in order to regain the blessing of health! It was this tendency that led to the first great disappointment of my life, which I experienced when I was only five years old, in the following manner: I had a little birth-mark on my left cheek, which was a great source of vexation to my parents, nobody understanding in those days how to remove anything of the sort. They were therefore all the more readily disposed to put faith in the assertion of a wandering charlatan, of his ability to make it disappear. I was fetched from my lessons by my father, placed in a chair, and the stranger proceeded to apply a dark fluid from a little phial to the spot, assuring my parents that when this had dried up, they would find on its removal no trace of the mole left. Somehow or other I had understood that by means of this magical process, I should never be naughty again. As might be expected, when the stain of the fluid was washed away, the mole was there just as before, with a slight scar into the bargain, and I was as naughty as ever! That was my first real big disappointment. The next came when I was six, with my first glimpse of the sea. When we reached the shore to go on board the boat, it was low tide, and instead of the wide far-reaching plain of water I was prepared to see, there was nothing but sand, with a few pools. To my mother’s apostrophe,--“Look, Elizabeth! there is the sea!” I could not find a word to say in reply, I was too bitterly disappointed. I had expected to behold a great towering wall of water, like that I was familiar with in the pictures of the crossing of the Red Sea by the Children of Israel. And here was nothing but sand, with a few wretched pools! Afterwards I saw the great expanse of water, always in movement, and stretching out far away, but it was too late then, the first