Solitude, however, is not the only soil in which this noxious weed springs up, spreading around its baleful glooms; it sometimes appears with deeply rooted violence in minds unused to retirement of every kind. In the course of my practice as a physician, I was called upon to attend a young lady, whose natural disposition had been extremely cheerful, until a severe fit of sickness damped her spirits, and rendered her averse to all those lively pleasures which fascinate the youthful mind. The debility of her frame, and the change of her temper were not sufficiently attended to in the early stages of her convalescence. The anxiety of her mind was visible in the altered features of her face; and she was frequently heard to express a melancholy regret that she had consumed so many hours in the frivolous, though innocent, amusements of the age. Time increased, by almost imperceptible degrees, these symptoms of approaching melancholy; and at length exhibited themselves by penitential lamentations of the sin she had committed with respect to the most trifling actions of her life, and in which no shadow of offence could possibly be found. At the time I was called in, this superstitious melancholy was attended with certain indications of mental derangement. The distemper clearly originated in the indisposition of the body, and the gloomy apprehensions which disease and pain, had introduced into the mind, during a period of many months. This once lively, handsome, but now almost insane female, was daily attacked with such violent paroxysms of her complaint, that she lost all sense of her situation, and exclaimed, in horrid distraction and deep despair, that her perdition was already accomplished, and that _the fiends were waiting to receive her soul, and plunge it into the bitterest torments of hell_. Her constitution, however, still fortunately retained sufficient strength to enable me, by the power of medicine, gradually to change its temperament, and to reduce the violence of the fever which had been long preying upon her life. Her mind became more calm in proportion as her nerves recovered their former tone; and when her intellectual powers were in a condition to be acted on with effect, I successfully counteracted the baleful effects of superstition by the wholesome infusion of real religion, and restored by degrees, a lovely, young, and virtuous woman, to her family and herself.