sensibility of the nervous system. But her physician, and he was a man who
certainly knew better than she did, she confessed, for he was a man who
really knew every thing, assured her that this was indisputably "the
genuine temperament of genius."

I soon grew vain of my fears. My antipathy, my _natural_, positively
natural antipathy to the sight or bare idea of a Jew, was talked of by
ladies and by gentlemen; it was exhibited to all my mother's acquaintance,
learned and unlearned; it was a medical, it was a metaphysical wonder, it
was an _idiosyncrasy_, corporeal, or mental, or both; it was--in short,
more nonsense was talked about it than I will repeat, though I perfectly
remember it all; for the importance of which at this period I became to
successive circles of visitors fixed every circumstance and almost every
word indelibly in my memory. It was a pity that I was not born some years
earlier or later, for I should have flourished a favourite pupil of Mesmer,
the animal magnetizer, or I might at this day be a celebrated somnambulist.
No, to do myself justice, I really had no intention to deceive, at least
originally; but, as it often happens with those who begin by being dupes, I
was in imminent danger of becoming a knave. How I escaped it, I do not well
know. For here, a child scarce seven years old, I saw myself surrounded by
grown-up wise people, who were accounting different ways for that, of which
I alone knew the real, secret, simple cause. They were all, without my
intending it, my dupes. Yet when I felt that I had them in my power, I did
not deceive them much, not much more than I deceived myself. I never was
guilty of deliberate imposture. I went no farther than affectation and
exaggeration, which it was in such circumstances scarcely possible for me
to avoid; for I really often did not know the difference between my own
feelings, and the descriptions I heard given of what I felt.

Fortunately for my integrity, my understanding, and my health, people began