determines the degree of our annoyance. A person who cannot endure the
crackling of the steam-pipe can listen with pleasure to the crackling of an
open fire or the noise of a running brook.

It is said that the sensitive and emotional Erasmus had so delicate a
digestion that he could neither eat fish nor endure the smell of it; but
we are led to suspect that obsession played a part in his troubles when we
further learn that he could not bear an iron stove in the room in which he
worked, but had to have either a porcelain stove or an open fire.

If we can trust the sources from which Charles Reade drew his deductions
regarding the character of the parental stock, Erasmus came fairly by his
sensitive disposition. In "The Cloister and the Hearth" we find the father
of Erasmus, fleeing from his native land, in fear of his life on account of
a crime he thought he had committed, frozen, famished and exhausted, unable
to enter the door of a friendly inn on account of his aversion to the
issuing odors. Forced by his sufferings at last to enter the inn, he visits
each corner in turn, analyzing its peculiar smell and choosing finally the
one which seems to him the least obnoxious.

I have heard somewhere, but cannot place, the story of a prominent writer
who was so disturbed by the mechanical lawn-mower of his neighbor that he
insisted upon the privilege of defraying the expense of its replacement by
the scythe.

Peculiar sensitiveness to sights, sounds and smells seems to be a common
attribute of genius. This sort of sensitiveness has even been credited with
being the main-spring of genius, but it is improbable that the curbing of
such aversions would in any way endanger it. However this may be, such
supersensitiveness ill becomes the rest of us, and these extreme aversions