All I had gained was self-rebuke, and another enemy. Having reached home, I read the Manual of Epictetus right through before I laid it down, and, if it did not teach me to love my enemies, it taught me at least to be ashamed of myself. Then I wrote to Mr Coningham, saying I was sorry I had spoken to him as I did, and begging him to let by-gones be by-gones; assuring him that, if ever I moved in the matter of our difference, he should be the first to whom I applied for assistance. He returned me no answer. CHAPTER LXIII. A COLLISION. And now came a dreary time of re-action. There seemed nothing left for me to do, and I felt listless and weary. Something kept urging me to get away and hide myself, and I soon made up my mind to yield to the impulse and go abroad. My intention was to avoid cities, and, wandering from village to village, lay my soul bare to the healing influences of nature. As to any healing in the power of Time, I despised the old bald-pate as a quack who performed his seeming cures at the expense of the whole body. The better cures attributed to him are not his at all, but produced by the operative causes whose servant he is. A thousand holy balms require his services for their full action, but they, and not he, are the saving powers. Along with Time I ranked, and with absolute hatred shrunk from--all those means which offered to cure me by making me forget. From a child I had a horror of forgetting; it always seemed to me like a loss of being, like a hollow scooped out of my very existence--almost like the loss of identity. At times I even shrunk from going to sleep, so much did it seem like yielding to an absolute death--a death so deep that the visible death is but a picture or type of it. If I could have been sure of dreaming, it would have been different, but in the uncertainty it seemed like consenting to nothingness. That one who thus felt should ever have been tempted to suicide, will reveal how painful if not valueless his thoughts and feelings--his conscious life--must have grown to him; and that the only thing which withheld him from it should be the fear that no death, but a more intense life might be the result, will reveal it yet more clearly. That in that sleep I might at least dream--there was the rub.