A scented breath of evening floated beneath the starry sky. Plants and creatures came to life at its whisper, which combined with the far-away murmur of the river and the resonance of space to give a new vividness to the grove of young pines. The tall and magnificent giant with the full flush of its grown strength made this sweetness of nature its own. Only the sick tree remained without benefit from the life-giving evening airs. Its sluggish viscid sap stagnated in the clogged stomata. Slowly its faint exhalations were breathed out through its pores: it seemed as though nothing could revive this imperfect organism: and as a matter of fact the first effect of illness is to disorganize the senses, to shatter the harmony of the unit attacked, so that it receives insufficiently and returns to the universal flow an insufficient rhythm. We have all had experience for a shorter or a longer time of this heart-breaking state of sickness, when a livid mist seems to settle itself thickly over our faculties, and the objective world weighs upon us with the whole weight of our material blemishes. At such a time our sensitiveness to influences outside ourselves is bad, whether it is that our disease-crippled organs are no longer powerful enough to communicate freely with the hidden forces through whose paths we move, or whether it is that these very forces in a manner avoid an unhealthy assemblage. Anyhow, it is only when suffering has disordered our state that we become fully aware of the gulf which lies between the external world and that other world within us. But what we learn more particularly at such moments is how our senses limit external influences. Our inner world is seething with a form of life which feels special to itself, since all contact with the vital currents of our environment has been cut off. Also, apart from a slight play given to the organs our physical sensibility detaches itself entirely from external adventures and elements. When our being has once reached this absolute it fixes itself there, and no piling up of circumstance, in however extravagant a degree, could move it an inch farther. Thus a loss of consciousness through illness involves as vivid a sense of dizzy falling into space as a literal plunge into some darkling abyss, and the perturbation of an inward malady may strike us as suddenly and sharply as the flash of a real lightning-stroke jazzing across our eyes.