Never mind with what it began. It has been said over and over again that work hurts nobody, but that worry kills. Home troubles, perhaps, beginning with the death of a very near and dear relation under circumstances of exceptional pain, were in my case the real foundation of the mischief, which grows very fast by what it feeds on when worry supervenes. I had, unfortunately, no necessity to work, became less and less disposed to do anything, and more and more the victim of diet-tables and prescriptions, with all their sad concomitants of dyspepsia and want of sleep, and, as a common consequence, the abuse of that grim and baleful drug, hydrate of chloral. The well-disposed interior will revolt at the very memory of its hideous taste, and fly to warning and remonstrance. As day by day the illness crept upon me, and the weary phantom of Self--and Self from its most distorted and morbid point of view--absorbed at last every thought and every energy, the well-known 'differentia' of the illness, the ground was being comfortably cleared for the experience that was to follow. Bred in the careless modern school of indifference to higher hopes and feelings; never an unbeliever, I hope (remembering Dr. Johnson's saying: 'Sir, if he is an infidel, 'tis as a dog's an infidel; he never thought about it'), but practically living the life of one, I was without the one stay and rest which can carry men triumphantly over worse troubles than mine. I had to kill Self as all of us must who would fain rise upon the stepping-stones of the dead giant to better things, before my illness was to bring forth its fruit. I hope and pray that it has done so now. It strikes me that I am preluding still. But I believe that my experience, thus far, will appeal directly to many hundreds of men; and I wish to warn them fully and fairly--it is my object in these papers to do so--under the present condition of our law, to what hypochondria may lead, if they carry it so far as to bore their nearest and dearest, justly desirous to be amused and comfortable in life.