and he took me with him in driving about the country on political and business errands. We could not have spent many days in this way, when, as it seems, I woke one morning in a sort of crisis, and having put my fear to the test of water suddenly dashed from a doorway beside me and failed of the convulsion which I was always expecting, I began imperceptibly to get the better of my demon. My father's talk always distracted me somewhat, and that morning especially his disgust with the beefsteak fried in lard which the landlady gave us for breakfast at the country tavern where we had passed the night must even have amused me, as a touch of the comedy blent with the tragedy in the Shakespearian drama of life. But no doubt a more real help was his recurrence, as often as I chose, to his own youthful suffering from hypochondria, and his constantly repeated assurance that I not only would not and could not have hydrophobia from that out-dated dog-bite, but that I must also soon cease to have hypochondria. I understood as well as he that it was not the fear of that malady which I was suffering, but the fear of the fear; that I was in no hallucination, no illusion as to the facts, but was helpless in the nervous prostration which science, or our poor village medicine, was yet many years from knowing or imagining. I have heard and read that sometimes people in their apprehension of the reality can bring on a false hydrophobia and die of it in the agonies their fancy creates. It may be so; but all that fear could do was done in me; and I did not die. I could not absolutely fix the moment when I began to find my way out of the cloud of misery which lowered on my life, but I think that it was when I had gathered a little strength in my forced respite from work, and from the passing of the summer heat. It was as if the frost which people used to think put an end to the poisonous miasm of the swamps, but really only killed the insect sources of the malaria, had wrought a like sanitation in my fancy. My fear when it once lifted never quite overwhelmed me again, but it was years before I could endure the sight of the word which embodied it; I shut the book or threw from me the paper where I found it in print; and even now, after sixty years, I cannot bring myself to write it or speak it without some such shutting of the heart as I knew at the sight or sound of it in that dreadful time. The effect went deeper than I could say without accusing myself of exaggeration for both good and evil. In self-defense I learnt to practise a psychological juggle; I came to deal with my own state of mind as another would deal with it, and to combat my fears as if they were alien.