Narrative and Miscellaneous PapersDe Quincey, Thomas
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Narrative and Miscellaneous Papers
De Quincey, Thomas
English essays; English fiction
an exertion, I lost much of my sleep; a privation that, under the
circumstances explained, deterred me from trying the experiment too
often. For one or two years, I accomplished more than I have here
claimed, viz., from six to seven thousand miles in the twelve months.
Let me add to this slight abstract of my own experience, in a point
where it is really difficult to offer any useful advice, (the tastes
and habits of men varying so much in this chapter of exercise,) that
one caution seems applicable to the case of all persons suffering from
nervous irritability, viz., that a secluded space should be measured off
accurately, in some private grounds not liable to the interruption or
notice of chance intruders; for these annoyances are unendurable to the
restless invalid; to be questioned upon trivial things is death to
him; and the perpetual anticipation of such annoyances is little less
distressing. Some plan must also be adopted for registering the number
of rounds performed. I once walked for eighteen months in a circuit so
confined that forty revolutions were needed to complete a mile. These
I counted, at one time, by a rosary of beads; every tenth round being
marked by drawing a blue bead, the other nine by drawing white beads.
But this plan, I found in practice, more troublesome and inaccurate than
that of using ten detached counters, stones, or anything else that was
large enough and solid. These were applied to the separate bars of a
garden chair; the first bar indicating of itself the first decade, the
second bar the second decade, and so on. In fact, I used the chair in
some measure as a Roman abacus, but on a still simpler plan; and as the
chair offered sixteen bars, it followed, that on covering the last bar
of the series with the ten markers, I perceived without any trouble of
calculation the accomplishment of my fourth mile.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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