although I only half believe it practically, that this fixity of form
is a frequent symptom of the disease, and that the general weakness
manifests itself in a determinate horror, which gradually fades with
returning health.

For months--many months--this dreadful conviction of coming idiocy or
insanity lay upon me like some poisonous reptile with its fangs driven
into my very marrow, so that I could not shake it off. It went with me
wherever I went, it got up with me in the morning, walked about with me
all day, and lay down with me at night. I managed, somehow or other,
to do my work, but I prayed incessantly for death; and to such a state
was I reduced that I could not even make the commonest appointment for
a day beforehand. The mere knowledge that something had to be done
agitated me and prevented my doing it.

In June next year my holiday came, and I went away home to my father's
house. Father and mother were going, for the first time in their
lives, to spend a few days by the seaside together, and I went with
them to Ilfracombe. I had been there about a week, when on one
memorable morning, on the top of one of those Devonshire hills, I
became aware of a kind of flush in the brain and a momentary relief
such as I had not known since that November night. I seemed, far away
on the horizon, to see just a rim of olive light low down under the
edge of the leaden cloud that hung over my head, a prophecy of the
restoration of the sun, or at least a witness that somewhere it shone.
It was not permanent, and perhaps the gloom was never more profound,
nor the agony more intense, than it was for long after my Ilfracombe
visit. But the light broadened, and gradually the darkness was
mitigated. I have never been thoroughly restored. Often, with no
warning, I am plunged in the Valley of the Shadow, and no outlet seems