Now, for the first time, she related to him two most significant episodes of her girlhood. Once, it appeared, when she was hardly nine years old, she was walking along a country road, past a forest, when a wood-cutter—“a big man, with big arms and hands projecting from short sleeves”—tried to catch her and carry her into the forest. “He ran after me with outstretched arms. I screamed, and ran from him as fast as I could, calling for help all the time.” And, on another occasion, when she was even younger—only six—on her way to school through the woods, a man met her, gave her candy, talked to her nicely, and all at once seized her so roughly that she began to scream with fright and pain. At that moment somebody came along, and the man released her and fled. These were the men whom she chiefly saw in her dreams; these were the shocks which, aggravated by the more recent experiences of a not dissimilar sort with her brother-in-law, were the true determinants of her hysteria—as was proved by the fact that upon psychological disintegration of her subconscious memories of them, a speedy and lasting return to health resulted. In like manner the seemingly epileptic attacks of a nineteen-year-old New York “street arab” were found to be nothing more than the external manifestation of subconscious memory-images, dating back to early childhood, of nights passed in a dark, damp, terror-inspiring cellar. The sight of the discoloured corpse of a man who had died from cholera left in the mind of a sensitive girl of ten such a painful impression that years afterward, quite unaccountably as it seemed, she developed an abnormal fear of contracting some deadly disease; and had she not fortunately been taken to a skilled medical psychologist (Doctor Pierre Janet) she would almost certainly have ended her days in an asylum. In the case of an over-worked Boston young man, thought to be suffering from “dementia praecox,” it was found that his morbid notion that he had committed an “unpardonable sin” was only a hysterical product of subconsciously remembered fears of childhood. The victim himself eventually recognised this, declaring, in an autobiographical statement made at his physician’s request: “My abnormal fear certainly originated from doctrines of hell which I heard in early childhood, particularly from a rather ignorant elderly woman who taught Sunday-school. My early religious thought was chiefly concerned with the direful eternity of torture that might be awaiting me if I was not good enough to be saved.”