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Now surely there will come an age when the presentation of science at war with Fortune and the Fates, will be deemed the true epic of modern life; and the aspect of a scientific humanist who, by dint of incessant watchfulness, has maintained a System against those active forties, cannot be reckoned less than sublime, even though at the moment he but sit upon his horse, on a fine March morning such as this, and smile wistfully to behold the son of his heart, his System incarnate, wave a serene adieu to tutelage, neither too eager nor morbidly unwilling to try his luck alone for a term of two weeks.

He likes beer, and smokes moderately, takes walking exercise daily, and has a healthily high estimate of the value of his teaching. He has a good but untrained tenor voice, and takes a pleasure in singing airs of a popular and cheerful character. He is fond, but not morbidly fond, of reading, chiefly fiction pervaded with a vaguely pious optimism, sleeps well, and rarely dreams.

By this time his senses, too, were morbidly acute. The sight and smell of drugs, dressings, and disinfectants afflicted him with an agony of sensation. There was no escaping these things in the little flat, and he could not help associating his wife with them: it seemed as if a crowd of trivial and sordid images was blotting out the delicate moral impressions he had once had.

He had come to be almost morbidly on the look-out for evidence which might go to prove that this cotton-wool existence was stealing from the child the birthright of courage which was his from both his parents.

She understood the spirit that had moved him to drive the mare that forty miles; nor, in spite of a certain sympathy for the jaded creature, did she condemn him for it. She was too much a child of the prairie to morbidly sentimentalize over the matter. The mare was a savage of the worst type, and she knew that prairie horses in their breaking often require drastic treatment.

Remember the little child. In that supervention which is so readily accepted as a divine warning, when the imagination is morbidly excited, and when the conscience, though lulled asleep for a moment, is still asleep so lightly that the sigh of a breeze, the fall of a leaf, can awake it with a start of terror, I took the voice for that of my guardian angel.

One night a negro woman was burned to death in a house next door to us, and Riley said that our landlady would be oppressively emotional at breakfast, because she generally made use of such opportunities as offered, being of a morbidly sentimental turn, and so we should find it best to let her talk along and say nothing back it was the only way to keep her tears out of the gravy.

But now she was seized with a kind of chronic fever, attended with absolute privation of sleep, an aversion to even the lightest nourishment, and an acute nervous susceptibility to all the outward impressions of which she had long seemed so unconscious; morbidly alive to the faintest sound, shrinking from the light as from a torture.

Morbidly Franciscan, again! and I am really compelled to leave out one little bit my friend liked, as all kindly and hopeful women would, about everything turning out right, and being to some good end. For we have no business whatever with the ends of things, but with their beings; and their beings are often entirely bad. Things may always be seen truly by candid people, though never completely.

She did not shrink from labor, but with the false pride so general she did shrink morbidly from meeting those who knew her in the past, and from their learning where and how she lived. She was wholly bent on seclusion until their fortunes were greatly mended, fondly hoping that her father would rally such a constituency from his Southern acquaintance that he would soon command a fine salary.