The patient is irritable, and fractious, peevish, and pettish. He is morbidly anxious about trifles: slight ruffles on the surface, and trivial annoyances in the family circle or during the course of business, worry, flurry, tease and fret him, nothing satisfying or soothing his mind, and everything, to his distempered fancy, going wrong within the sacred precincts of domestic life. He is quick at fancying affronts, and greatly exaggerates the slightest and most trifling acts of supposed inattention. The least irregularity on the part of the domestics excites, angers, and vexes him. He is suspicious of and quarrels with his nearest relations, and mistrusts his best, kindest, and most faithful friends. While in this premonitory stage of mental derangement, bordering closely on an attack of acute insanity, he twists, distorts, misconceives, misconstrues, and perverts in a most singular manner every look, gesture, action, and word of those closely associated, and nearly related to him. Considering that Dr. Winslow does really in that paragraph sketch the moral characteristics of at least a score of people known to every one of us, all this is alarming enough. And considering, too, how common a thing sleeplessness is among men who go through hard mental work, or who are pressed by many cares and anxieties, it is even more alarming to read, that-- Wakefulness is one of the most constant concomitants of some types of incipient brain disease, and in many cases a certain forerunner of insanity. It is an admitted axiom in medicine, that the brain cannot be in a healthy condition while a state of sleeplessness exists. But I pass away from this part of my subject. I do not believe that it is good for either my readers or myself to look from a medical point of view at those defects or morbid manifestations in our mental organization which stamp us screws. We accept the fact, generally; without going into details. It is a bad thing for a man to be always feeling his pulse after every little exertion, and fancying that its acceleration or irregularity indicates that something is wrong. Such a man is in the fair way to settled hypochondria. And I think it is even worse to be always watching closely the play of the mental machine, and thinking that this process or that emotion is not as it ought to be. Let a man work his mind fairly and moderately, and not worry himself as to its state. The mind can get no more morbid habit than that of continually watching itself for a stumble. Except in the case of metaphysicians, whose business it is to watch and analyse the doings of the mind, the mind ought to be like the stomach. You know that your stomach is right, because you never feel that you have one; but the work intended for that organ is somehow done. And common folk should know that they have minds, only by finding the ends fairly attained, which are intended to be attained by that most sensitive and ticklish piece of machinery.