shalt go; I will guide thee with Mine eye: be not like to horse and mule, whose mouths must be drawn with bit and bridle, else they will not come near thee." That was an answer, and I went to sleep again, satisfied that it was not anything evil, but a benignant power that spoke to me, though somewhat ambiguously. After I had quieted myself with some days' solitude, I went out again one evening with the American and a young Frenchman who corrects my manuscripts. It was somewhat tedious, and I returned home shortly before midnight with a bad conscience, because, being drawn into a heated conversation, I had been compelled to speak evil of some one absent. What I said was in self-defence against a liar, and absolutely true. About two o'clock I awoke and heard some one stamping in the room above me, and then come down the stairs and go into the room by the side of mine. Am I then watched? I had already had the same experience here in the hotel in September, when I lived on the third storey. So it cannot be an accident If now, as is probable, my unseen mentor wishes to punish me, how cunning it is to keep me uncertain whether they are human beings who persecute me or not! Though I have convinced myself that no one persecutes me, I am again drawn into the old circle of the self-torturing belief that some one does. When once the question is raised, there begins a dance of conjectures kept up by my conscience, which accuses me even when I have acted in pure self-defence in rebutting unjust accusations. I feel as though I were tied backwards to a stake, and that all the passers-by have the right to spit on me unpunished, but if I spit back, I am scourged, choked, hunted by furies. The whole world, even the meanest beggar, has rights against mu. If I only knew why! All the tactics are so feminine that I cannot get rid of my suspicion. For when a woman for years has done injury and wrong to a man, and he, out of innate nobility, has not lifted his hand in return, but at last strikes round him as when one drives away a fly, the woman raises an outcry, calls the police, and exclaims, "He defends himself!" Or, when in school an unreasonable teacher falls on a pupil, who is groundlessly accused, and the latter, from an injured sense of justice, seeks to defend himself, what does the teacher do? He proceeds to corporal punishment, exclaiming, "So you answer back, do you?" I have answered back. And therefore I am punished. The punishment continues eight days and nights successively. The consequence is that I become depressed and unfit for social intercourse. My friend the American, weary of me, quietly withdraws, and as he has set up a domestic establishment, I find myself again alone. But it is not entirely a mutual aversion which has a second time separated us, for we have both noticed that during our last meeting strange things have happened, which could be only ascribed to the intervention of conscious powers who intended to arouse aversion between us.