and it was just then I was taken ill with this typhoid fever that has
left me the wreck you see," he said, with a whimsically sad smile. "That
is not the worst, though," he went on, a shadow falling over his
upturned face, "I cannot explain it, although my doctor pretends to. I
had written--oh! say half-a-dozen chapters of this book before my
sickness. As soon as I began to be convalescent, I wanted to amuse
myself by going on with it. I had my plot roughly blocked out, my
characters were entirely distinct in my mind, yet when I took up my pen
again, I found I could not write connectedly. It was simply horrible. I
shall never forget that day. Of course I imagined I should never write
again. I sent for two or three doctors, announced that I had paresis,
and was told that it was madness for a man who had been as ill as I to
attempt any sort of literary work for weeks, if not months. But the
sense that I absolutely could not write preyed upon me. I used to do a
little each day in spite of their orders, but it is only now that I am
beginning to feel the confusion of ideas lessening, and the ability to
present them coherently growing Even yet I only write disconnected parts
of the chapters I had planned. It is--oh! what is that pet word of
phrenologists? _continuity_, that I have not at my command. I suppose
you cannot quite understand the agony of such an experience, never
having gone through it. Only yesterday I tore up thirty pages of
manuscript, and had more than half a mind to burn the whole thing. It is
only the consideration of the possibly great loss to the literary world
that withholds me, you know," he said with a half bitter laugh, throwing
down the ruins of the flowers he had pulled to pieces with his thin,
nervous hands, and rising.

"But I've been an unconscionable bore, even for a valetudinarian, and I
believe they are privileged to tax people's amiability. I hope I havn't
tired you so that you will forbid my coming again. I will promise not to