The notion that nervous weakness was a species of illness to which any one might fall a victim if placed in conditions calculated to produce it, was entirely beyond the mental range of these good people. And following the natural law, in proportion to their ignorance was their conviction of profound wisdom. Mrs. T---- had more and more earned for herself a wide reputation for “strong-mindedness.” She was popularly supposed to be “hard,” and judging from my own experience of her character, I should say that the popular judgment was in that instance more correct than usual; though why so noble a quality as mental strength should be associated with defectiveness, with the terrible process of loss of feeling--a continual lopping of the sensitive tendrils by means of which the human plant keeps itself in touch with its environment and draws from it its mental nutriment--I am unable to imagine. Now, my friends were convinced that the defect of emotional nature commonly called hardness, and a condition in which emotional symptoms are often manifested, were things incompatible. They therefore bestowed ridicule upon me, and considered that they had “fixed that matter up.” My belief is that the dear ladies would have “fixed up” with equal alacrity any matter in the whole of this wide universe. But Dame Nature, always stern in carrying out her threats, slowly but surely brought Mrs. T----’s downward career to its logical conclusion. She was compelled to give up work and seek seclusion for a season. Her friends and acquaintance were surprised, but the tragedy was by no means astonishing. Ambition, and consequent overwork, began the mischief; the hardness which was supposed to be her safeguard completed it. Once out of sympathy with her fellow-creatures, her sorrows were endless. Loving herself more than them, she tried to act in her own interests in opposition to theirs. Her fellow-creatures took their revenge. The perception that is born of sympathy now being blunted, she estimated their characters wrongly; she confided in the untrustworthy and was suspicious of the trustworthy. Her blunders were productive of suffering not only to herself but to others. Blame, friction, and harassing cares followed, in the midst of which her brain gave way. There are those who, cursed by the taint of insanity in their families, pray daily to God to preserve them from this frightful evil, and who, even while they are praying, turn their backs upon the road that leads to sanity. That road is the enlarging of the sympathies.