among those waiting in the station.

The longer these tendencies are retained in adult life, the greater the
danger of their becoming coercive; and so far as the well-established case
is concerned the obsessive act must be performed, though the business,
social, and political world should come to a stand-still. Among the stories
told in illustration of compulsive tendency in the great, may be instanced
the touching of posts, and the placing of a certain foot first, in the
case of Dr. Johnson, who, it appears, would actually retrace his steps and
repeat the act which failed to satisfy his requirements, with the air of
one with something off his mind.

A child who must kick posts is father to the man who cannot eat an egg
which has been boiled either more or less than four minutes; who cannot
work without absolute silence; who cannot sleep if steam-pipes crackle; and
who must straighten out all the tangles of his life, past, present, and
future, before he can close his eyes in slumber or take a vacation. The boy
Carlyle, proud, shy, sensitive, and pugnacious, was father to the man who
made war upon the neighbor's poultry, and had a room, proof against sound,
specially constructed for his literary labors.

The passive obsessions are peculiarly provocative of worry. Such are
extreme aversions to certain animals, foods, smells, sounds, and sights, or
insistent discomfort if affairs are not ordered to our liking. A gentleman
once told me that at the concert he did not mind if his neighbor followed
the score, but when he consulted his programme during the performance it
distressed him greatly.

Such instances illustrate the fact that when our obsessions rule us it is
not the noise or the sight, but our idea of the fitness of things, that