rolling and a tearin', bless you!--this young woman, now, has 'em
dreadful bad.'

She turned up this young woman's face with her hand as she said it.
This young woman was seated on the floor, pondering in the
foreground of the afflicted. There was nothing repellent either in
her face or head. Many, apparently worse, varieties of epilepsy
and hysteria were about her, but she was said to be the worst here.
When I had spoken to her a little, she still sat with her face
turned up, pondering, and a gleam of the mid-day sun shone in upon
her.

- Whether this young woman, and the rest of these so sorely
troubled, as they sit or lie pondering in their confused dull way,
ever get mental glimpses among the motes in the sunlight, of
healthy people and healthy things? Whether this young woman,
brooding like this in the summer season, ever thinks that somewhere
there are trees and flowers, even mountains and the great sea?
Whether, not to go so far, this young woman ever has any dim
revelation of that young woman--that young woman who is not here
and never will come here; who is courted, and caressed, and loved,
and has a husband, and bears children, and lives in a home, and who
never knows what it is to have this lashing and tearing coming upon
her? And whether this young woman, God help her, gives herself up
then and drops like a coach-horse from the moon?

I hardly knew whether the voices of infant children, penetrating
into so hopeless a place, made a sound that was pleasant or painful
to me. It was something to be reminded that the weary world was
not all aweary, and was ever renewing itself; but, this young woman