"They seldom do, Reuben, though often they injure themselves. She is nearly forty, that woman we saw today--I've known her bite her tongue and bruise herself, but nothing worse. As a rule they die somewhat young. It's as well you saw her so--the condition is not too rare and you'll encounter it again." "And the books?" "Have nothing to offer but speculation and bad advice. Nothing I've tried ever had the slightest effect.... What's that?--I mean the one that called from back there in the pasture." "Red-winged blackbird." "I wish I knew 'em all, the way you do." "Brought up with 'em in the wilderness, Amadeus. But nobody could know them all.... Do the books tell anything of the cause?" "Nothing worth your notice. Speculation, most of it not based on clinical observation. And (as you suggest) without at least some knowledge of immediate causes, treatment's only a blind groping. We must try it of course, because sometimes a guess is correct. But somehow we must also push back along the chain of causes--widen the area of light--somehow.... As you may or may not know, there are many going about in the world far madder than that poor epileptic, who is not really mad at all but merely drops into her fit from time to time, and usually comes out of it unharmed. A fearful thing to watch, Ru--I dare say you still feel it in your stomach. But some of the forms of madness that don't so loudly announce themselves are much worse." "The world may be a mad place, Amadeus, but there go the peeper frogs. I told you they might, on such an afternoon." "So they do. You don't suppose----?" "If we continue to the pond, they'll stop. However, should we then squat patient in our boots, the thing might be done--imitating boulders, you know. We might, as it were, rock ourselves into the semblance of a natural outgrowth." "Who now hath plumbed the depths of a contumelious paronomasia?" "Ha!" "That log looks more comfortable." "If the ants on it are black, yes. If red, no." "They look black, the few I see. Is there a difference?" "Oh, my friend! How did you survive till I came to you?" "Don't know." "Yes, they're black.... By the madder ones, you mean the raving kind? Those with wild delusions?" "Those, and others. I was thinking of the quieter sort, who are seldom called mad. Men and women eaten up with suspicion. So that--I think you've never encountered this, but beware of it if you do--so that everything happening within their purview must be bent to the shape of that suspicion; and to hear them talk you'd suppose the whole world was allied in conspiracy against them. I'd guess that such a state of mind is begotten of a most fearful vanity. And what evil is commoner than vanity? Of course that particular sickness of the mind is only one of its fruits. How seldom do you find anyone who hath ever attempted to look on his own life with something like the eye of eternity! But without at least some detachment, vanity is bound to grow."