Feeling, as you know I do, the deepest solicitude for the success of the enterprize you are engaged in, I adopt this as the last method I can invent to aid you, in case (which God forbid) you shall need any aid. I do not place what I am going to say on paper, because I can say it any better in that way than I could by word of mouth; but because, were I to say it orrally, before we part,2Open page most likely you would forget it at the verry time when it might do you some good. As I think it reasonable that you will feel verry badly some time between this and the final consummation of your purpose, it is intended that you shall read this just at such a time.
Why I say it is reasonable that you will feel verry badly yet, is, because of three special causes, added to the general one which I shall mention.
The general cause is, that you are naturally of a nervous temperament; and this I say from what I have seen of you personally, and what you have told me concerning your mother at various times, and concerning your brother William at the time his wife died.
The first special cause is, your exposure to bad weather on your journey, which my experience clearly proves to be verry severe on defective nerves.
The second is, the absence of all business and conversation of friends, which might divert your mind, and give it occasional rest from that intensity of thought, which will some times wear the sweetest idea thread-bare and turn it to the bitterness of death.
The third is, the rapid and near approach of that crisis on which all your thoughts and feelings concentrate.
If from all these causes you shall escape and go through triumphantly, without another ``twinge of the soul,'' I shall be most happily, but most egregiously deceived.
If, on the contrary, you shall, as I expect you will at some time, be agonized and distressed, let me, who have some reason to speak with judgement on such a subject, beseech you, to ascribe it to the causes I have mentioned; and not to some false and ruinous suggestion of the Devil.
``But'' you will say ``do not your causes apply to every one engaged in a like undertaking?''
By no means. The particular causes, to a greater or less extent, perhaps do apply in all cases; but the general one, nervous debility, which is the key and conductor of all the particular ones, and without