Hitherto he had gone through his work with great energy, in combination with perfect calm. The energy still remained, it even increased; but the calm did not remain--it was succeeded by a perpetual hurry and fever. In a short time after these symptoms first developed themselves, Jacob Ogden could not add up a column of figures without excitement; when he came to the totals his heart beat violently, and he began to make mistakes, which he perceived, and was afterwards nervously anxious to avoid. As his malady increased, he could not open a letter without emotion, or sign a cheque without a strong effort of self-control; in a word, the nervous system was rapidly giving way. And instead of taking rest, which could alone have restored him to health--rest at Wenderholme amongst his own fair fields in the beautiful months of spring--he persisted and persisted, and would not allow himself to be beaten. The people about him did not know any thing of his condition. He was more irritable, he pushed everybody faster than he had formerly done, and he was constantly moving from one place to another; but his determination to control himself was so strong, and his power of _appearing_ well still so considerable, that such people as Mrs. Ogden and young Jacob (unaccustomed as they both were to that kind of suffering, and incapable of imagining it) had not the most distant suspicion that he had become unfit for work. Indeed, although an experienced London physician, who had made brain disease his particular study, would no doubt have seen at a glance that this was a case which needed the most watchful care, it may be doubted whether a country practitioner (even so clever, naturally, as Dr. Bardly) would have warned Jacob Ogden in time. The overtasked brain translated its own dangerous condition by _anxiety_, and the anxiety was not about health, but, as often happens in such instances, about that subject which had most occupied the patient's mind before the approaches of disease--namely, money. With all his riches, Jacob Ogden grew more nervously anxious about money matters than the poorest laborer on his estate. His mind ran incessantly upon possible causes of loss; and as in the best-regulated property such causes are always infinitely numerous, he found them only too easily. The thousands of details which, when in health, he had carried in his head as lightly as we carry the words of a thoroughly mastered language, began to torment him with the apprehension that they might escape his memory; and whereas, in his better days, no fact troubled him except just at the moment when he wanted it, they now importunately intruded upon his mind when they could only disturb and confuse it.