that was raging within me. For several days previous to this transient
weakness the weather had been heavy and lowering, rain falling
irregularly, alternating with a heavy Scottish mist. During one of the
last days of this protracted storm my old nervous difficulty returned
in redoubled strength. Commencing in the shoulder, with its hot
needles it crept over the neck and speedily spread its myriad fingers
of fire over the nerves that gird the ear, now drawing their burning
threads and now vibrating the tense agony of these filaments of
sensation. By a leap it next mastered the nerves that surround the
eye, driving its forked lightning through each delicate avenue into
the brain itself, and confusing and confounding every power of thought
and of will. This is neuralgia--such neuralgia as sometimes drives
sober men in the agony of their distress into drunkenness, and good
men into blasphemy.

While suffering under a paroxysm of this kind, rendered all the more
difficult to endure from the exhausted state of the body--in doubt
even, at intervals, whether my mind was still under my own control--an
impulse of almost suicidal despair suggested the thought, "Go back to
opium; you can not stand this." The temptation endured but for a
moment, "No, I have suffered too much, and I can not go back. I had
rather die;" and from that moment the possibility of resuming the
habit passed from my mind forever.

It was at night, however, that the suffering from this change of habit
became most unendurable. While the day-light lasted it was possible to
go out-of-doors, to sit in the sunlight, to walk, to do something to
divert attention from the exhausted and shattered body; but when
darkness fell, and these resources failed, nothing remained except a
patient endurance with which to combat the strange torment. The only