Only this week in a city horse-car I watched the faces of my fellow-passengers,—­women, most of them—­with a pain at my heart.  Oh, the tired, strained, impatient faces, and the eager, alert, and anxious expression that belong to the people of this new and free country!  Some of these wretched mortals had babies with them,—­babies whose fretful wails seemed but to voice the mother’s expression of countenance.  In an uneasy way the little mites would be shifted from one shoulder to another, or trotted in nervousness that reminded me irresistibly of the nursery rhyme which might be the motto of the American mother: 

“, out of breath, They trot the baby, most to death, Sick or well, or cold or hot, It’s trottery, trottery, trottery, trot.”

Of all these women there was not one who sat still for three consecutive minutes.  Heads were twisted to look at the name of the corner lamp-posts, glove fingers were smoothed, the folds of dress-skirts shaken out, hats straightened,—­until I would fain have cried out in irreverent paraphrase, at sight of the unrest which I blush to confess made me conscious of my own nerves: 

“Not one sitteth still—­no, not one!”

That men have any patience with what they term “feminine fidgetiness,” is but an evidence that they are better Christians than we of the gentler sex are willing to admit.  For I think I am not making a sweeping assertion when I state that not one tolerably healthy man in five hundred knows what it is to have nerves such as are the birthright of his mother, sister, and wife.  And yet how well the physician, poet, autocrat and professor, Oliver Wendell Holmes, knows and sympathizes with this weakness in us!  He touches the truth in a direct way that wrings a sigh of familiar pain from many a patient soul.

“Some people have a scale of your whole nervous system and can play all the gamut of your sensibilities in semi-tones, touching the naked nerve-pulps as a pianist strikes the keys of his instrument.  I am satisfied that there are as great masters of this nerve-playing as Vieuxtemps or Thalberg in their lines of performance.  Married life is the school in which the most accomplished artists in this department are found.  A delicate woman is the best instrument; she has such a magnificent compass of sensibilities.  From the deep inward moan which follows pressure on the great nerves of right, to the sharp cry as the filaments of taste are struck with a crashing sweep, is a range which no other instrument possesses.”

And again he speaks of the less serious affection of the nerves as:  ...  “Not fear, but what I call nervousness,—­unreasoning, but irresistible; as when, for instance, one, looking at the sun going down, says:  ‘I will count fifty before it disappears,’ and as he goes on and it becomes doubtful whether he will reach the number, he gets strangely flurried, and his imagination pictures life and death and heaven and hell as the issues depending on the completion or non-completion of the fifty he is counting.”