What a wonderful picture the original source of the word suggests of the latter-day meaning.  Worry takes our manhood, womanhood, our high ambitions, our laudable endeavors, our daily lives, by the throat, and strangles, chokes, bites, tears, shakes them, hanging on like a wolf, a weasel, or a bull-dog, sucking out our life-blood, draining our energies, our hopes, our aims, our noble desires, and leaving us torn, empty, shaken, useless, bloodless, hopeless, and despairing.  It is the nightmare of life that rides us to discomfort, wretchedness, despair, and to that death-in-life that is no life at all.  It is the vampire that sucks out the good of us and leaves us like the rind of a squeezed-out orange; it is the cooking-process that extracts and wastes all the nutritious juices of the meat and leaves nothing but the useless and tasteless fibre.

Worry is a worse thief than the burglar or highwayman.  It goes beyond the train-wrecker or the vile wretch who used to lure sailing vessels upon a treacherous shore, in its relentless heartlessness.  Once it begins to control it never releases its hold unless its victim wakes up to the sure ruin that awaits him and frees himself from its bondage by making a great, continuous, and successful fight.

It steals the joy of married life, of fatherhood and motherhood; it destroys social life, club life, business life, and religious life.  It robs a man of friendships and makes his days long, gloomy periods, instead of rapidly-passing epochs of joy and happiness.  It throws around its victim a chilling atmosphere as does the iceberg, or the snow bank; it exhales the mists and fogs of wretchedness and misunderstanding; it chills family happiness, checks friendly intercourse, and renders the business occupations of life curses instead of blessings.

Worry manifests itself in a variety of ways.  It is protean in its versatility.  It can be physical or mental.  The hypochondriac conceives that everything is going to the “demnition bow-wows.”  Nothing can reassure him.  He sees in every article of diet a hidden fiend of dyspepsia; in every drink a demon of torture.  Every man he meets is a scoundrel, and every woman a leech.  Children are growing worse daily, and society is “rotten.”  The Church is organized for the mere fattening of a raft of preachers and parsons who preach what they don’t believe and never try to practice.  Lawyers and judges are all dishonest swindlers caring nothing for honor and justice and seeking only their fees; physicians and surgeons are pitiless wretches who scare their patients in order to extort money from them; men in office are waiting, lurking, hunting for chances to graft, eager to steal from their constituents at every opportunity.  He expects every thing, every animal, every man, every woman to get the best of him—­and, as a rule, he is not disappointed.  For we can nearly always be accommodated in life and get that for which we look.