"This is nature and truth," said I, after a pause--"powers a thousand times stronger than the brain-sick fancies of a diseased mind. It is the voice of God himself, sounding through the heart, and, like the electric energy, heaving it with convulsive throes, as if to cast forth from it the impious daring and unnatural purpose you have cherished in it so long that no lesser power will expel it. I rejoice in these throes; cherish them and aid them, for they are the expulsers of poison that, having got into your blood, and reached the heart, the seat of life, madly stimulates it to self-destruction. This is the time--here is the vantage-ground of a return to all that is right, true, and good, from cowardice, cruelty, irreligion, and even rebellion against God!" "Listen to him--listen to him!" cried the young woman, still sobbing. "Hear thae words o' truth, for they are sent from Heaven. Receive them into your heart, and it will be changed, and I will live to see my father enjoy life and be happy." "_When?_" groaned the miserable man, satirically, as if roused by the sound of the distasteful word "happy." "When I am sittin at the window o' a prison, thinkin o' my dead Agnes, and lookin at the red settin o' my sixty-fifth sun?" These words showed that the struggle had been ineffectual. Released from the grasp of his daughter, who sat at the side of the bed, he doggedly and sternly folded his arms, and relapsed into a silent fit of dejection. No effort would make him open his lips. There seemed to be no principle of reaction in his moral economy; all was penetrated by a fatal lethargy, which closed up every issue, broke every spring of living thought, feeling, or motion. My professional knowledge was entirely useless, my personal services unavailing. I called to him loudly to answer me, and got no reply but deep groans. I even shook him roughly, and tried to bend his head to his weeping daughter. My efforts were quickened by a sense that bore in upon me with fearful strength and importunity, that I had, by experimenting on his mind, and filling it with images of horror, increased the disease I intended to cure. Pained beyond measure, I was anxious to redeem my fault and correct my error by getting him again engaged in conversation, whereby I might have a last opportunity of drawing him into a train of thought which might lead to a sense of his awful condition, and a prospect of escaping from its present misery, and its horrible consequences. But my medicine had operated too powerfully. There he sat, unmoved, immoveable--a sad and melancholy victim of the worst species of hypochondria--that which exhibits as one of its pathognomonic symptoms, the desire, the determination, persevered in through all difficulties, all oppositions, all wiles and schemes, to commit self-murder.