for my child.  The doctor said that recovery was impossible, and that in one of the paroxysms of coughing she must die; the most distressing thing was that, at last, even a drop or two of milk would bring on the terrible convulsive choking, and it seemed cruel to add to the pain of the apparently dying child.  At length, one morning the doctor said she could not last through the day; I had sent for him hurriedly, for the body had suddenly swollen up as a result of the perforation of one of the pleurae, and the consequent escape of air into the cavity of the chest.  While he was there one of the fits of coughing came on, and it seemed as though it must be the last.  He took a small bottle of chloroform out of his pocket, and putting a drop on a handkerchief held it near the child’s face, till the drug soothed the convulsive struggle.  “It can’t do any harm at this stage,” he said, “and it checks the suffering.”  He went away, saying that he feared he would never see the child alive again.  One of the kindest friends I had in my married life was that same doctor, Mr. Lauriston Winterbotham; he was as good as he was clever, and, like so many of his noble profession, he had the merits of discretion and silence.  He never breathed a word as to my unhappiness, until in 1878 he came up to town to give evidence as to cruelty which—­had the deed of separation not been held as condonation—­would have secured me a divorce a mensa et thoro.

The child, however, recovered, and her recovery was due, I think, to that chance thought of Mr. Winterbotham’s about the chloroform, for I used it whenever the first sign of a fit of coughing appeared, and so warded off the convulsive attack and the profound exhaustion that followed, in which a mere flicker of breath at the top of the throat was the only sign of life, and sometimes even that disappeared, and I thought her gone.  For years the child remained ailing and delicate, requiring the tenderest care, but those weeks of anguish left a deeper trace on mother than on child.  Once she was out of danger I collapsed physically, and lay in bed for a week unmoving, and then rose to face a struggle which lasted for three years and two months, and nearly cost me my life, the struggle which transformed me from a Christian into an Atheist.  The agony of the struggle was in the first nineteen months—­a time to be looked back upon with shrinking, as it was a hell to live through at the time.  For no one who has not felt it knows the fearful anguish inflicted by doubt on the earnestly religious soul.  There is in life no other pain so horrible, so keen in its torture, so crushing in its weight.  It seems to shipwreck everything, to destroy the one steady gleam of happiness “on the other side” that no earthly storm could obscure; to make all life gloomy with a horror of despair, a darkness that verily may be felt.  Nothing but an imperious intellectual and moral necessity can drive into doubt a religious mind, for it is as though an earthquake shook the