"It" is a protean thing. More often than not it is a horrible dread of that Delirium Tremens which I have never had, but ought to have had long ago. I have read up the symptoms until I know each one of them. When I am in a very nervous and excited condition--when, for example, I could not face anybody at all and must be alone in my room with my bottle of whiskey--I stare at the wall to see if rats or serpents are running up it. I peer into the corners of the library to detect sheeted corpses standing there. I do not see anything of the sort. Even the imaginings of my fear cannot create them. I am, possibly, personally immune from Delirium Tremens, some people are. All the same, the fear of it racks me and tears me a hundred times a day. If it really seized me it surely would be almost enjoyable! Nothing, at any rate, can be more utterly dreadful than the continual apprehension. Then I have another and always constant fear--these fears, I want to insist, are fantastically intermingled with all the crossings, wood-touchings and frantic calculations I have to do each minute of my life. The other fear is that of Prison. Now I know perfectly well that I have done nothing in my life that could ever bring me near prison. All the same I cannot now hear a strange voice without a start of dread. A knock at the front door of my house unnerves me horribly. I open the door of whatever room I am in and listen with strained, furtive attention, slinking back and closing the door with a sob of relief when I realise that it is nothing more than the postman or the butcher's boy. I can hardly bear to read a novel now, because I so constantly meet with the word "arrest." "He was arrested in the middle of his conversation,"--"She placed an arresting hand upon his arm." . . . These phrases which constantly occur in every book I read fill me with horror. A wild phantasmagoria of pictures passes through my mind. I see myself being led out of my house with gyves upon my wrists like the beastly poem Hood made upon "Eugene Aram." Then there is the drive into Wordingham in a cab. All the officials at the station who know me so well cluster round. I am put into a third class carriage and the blinds are pulled down. At St. Pancras, where I am also known, it is worse. The next day there is the Magistrate's Court and all the papers full of my affair. I know it is all fantastic nonsense--moonshine, wild dream. But it is so appallingly real to me that I sometimes long to have got the trial over and to be sitting with shaven head, wearing coarse prison clothes, in a lonely cell. Then, I think to myself, I should really have peace. The worst would have happened and there would be an end of it all. There would be an end of deadly Fear.