for snobbishness a certain boyish diffidence for which few people gave me credit.  When we passed each other, almost daily, this group of girls and I, our mutual sign of recognition was a look in an opposite direction.  Now my opponent was well liked by these same girls and was entitled to their support.  Accordingly they applauded his good plays, which was fair.  They did not applaud my good plays, which was also fair.  But what was not fair was that they should applaud my bad plays.  Their doing so roiled my blood, and thanks to those who would have had me lose, I won.

In June, 1894, I received a high school diploma.  Shortly afterwards I took my examinations for Yale, and the following September entered the Sheffield Scientific School, in a non-technical course.

The last week of June, 1894, was an important one in my life.  An event then occurred which undoubtedly changed my career completely.  It was the direct cause of my mental collapse six years later, and of the distressing and, in some instances, strange and delightful experiences on which this book is based.  The event was the illness of an older brother, who, late in June, 1894, was stricken with what was thought to be epilepsy.  Few diseases can so disorganize a household and distress its members.  My brother had enjoyed perfect health up to the time he was stricken; and, as there had never been a suggestion of epilepsy, or any like disease, in either branch of the family, the affliction came as a bolt from a clear sky.  Everything possible was done to effect a cure, but without avail.  On July 4th, 1900, he died, after a six years’ illness, two years of which were spent at home, one year in a trip around the world in a sailing vessel, and most of the remainder on a farm near Hartford.  The doctors finally decided that a tumor at the base of the brain had caused his malady and his death.

As I was in college when my brother was first stricken, I had more time at my disposal than the other members of the family, and for that reason spent much of it with him.  Though his attacks during the first year occurred only at night, the fear that they might occur during the day, in public, affected my nerves from the beginning.

Now, if a brother who had enjoyed perfect health all his life could be stricken with epilepsy, what was to prevent my being similarly afflicted?  This was the thought that soon got possession of my mind.  The more I considered it and him, the more nervous I became; and the more nervous, the more convinced that my own breakdown was only a matter of time.  Doomed to what I then considered a living death, I thought of epilepsy, I dreamed epilepsy, until thousands of times during the six years that this disquieting idea persisted, my over-wrought imagination seemed to drag me to the very verge of an attack.  Yet at no time during my life have these early fears been realized.