if continued for any length of time, is almost certain to lead to some measure of insanity.  The man who night and day is never free from the thought of how he is to pay his way, to maintain his children, is going mad.  It is thoroughly evil when one single thought conies to take entire possession of the mind.  It shows the brain is going.  It is no wonder, my friendly reader, that so many men are mentally screws!  There is something perfectly awful in reading what are the premonitory symptoms of true insanity.  Read this, my friend, and be afraid of yourself.  Here are what Dr. Winslow says indicates that insanity is drawing near.  Have you never seen it?  Have you never felt it?

The patient is irritable, and fractious, peevish, and pettish.  He is morbidly anxious about trifles:  slight ruffles on the surface, and trivial annoyances in the family circle or during the course of business, worry, flurry, tease and fret him, nothing satisfying or soothing his mind, and everything, to his distempered fancy, going wrong within the sacred precincts of domestic life.  He is quick at fancying affronts, and greatly exaggerates the slightest and most trifling acts of supposed inattention.  The least irregularity on the part of the domestics excites, angers, and vexes him.  He is suspicious of and quarrels with his nearest relations, and mistrusts his best, kindest, and most faithful friends.  While in this premonitory stage of mental derangement, bordering closely on an attack of acute insanity, he twists, distorts, misconceives, misconstrues, and perverts in a most singular manner every look, gesture, action, and word of those closely associated, and nearly related to him.

Considering that Dr. Winslow does really in that paragraph sketch the moral characteristics of at least a score of people known to every one of us, all this is alarming enough.  And considering, too, how common a thing sleeplessness is among men who go through hard mental work, or who are pressed by many cares and anxieties, it is even more alarming to read, that—­

Wakefulness is one of the most constant concomitants of some types of incipient brain disease, and in many cases a certain forerunner of insanity.  It is an admitted axiom in medicine, that the brain cannot be in a healthy condition while a state of sleeplessness exists.

But I pass away from this part of my subject.  I do not believe that it is good for either my readers or myself to look from a medical point of view at those defects or morbid manifestations in our mental organization which stamp us screws.  We accept the fact, generally; without going into details.  It is a bad thing for a man to be always feeling his pulse after every little exertion, and fancying that its acceleration or irregularity indicates that something is wrong.  Such a man is in the fair way to settled hypochondria.  And I think it is even worse to be always watching closely the play of the mental machine, and thinking that this process or that emotion