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I have read, or tried to read your Surius, and Alban Butler, and so forth and they seemed to me bats and asses One really pitied the poor saints and martyrs for having such blind biographers such dunghill cocks, who overlooked the pearl of real human love and nobleness in them, in their greediness to snatch up and parade the rotten chaff of superstition, and self-torture, and spiritual dyspepsia, which had overlaid it.

An hour afterward he had found her tearing it into bits with an idiotic laugh. A little later He shut his eyes, as if to keep out some real sight before him. It seemed to him as if his whole boyhood had been made up of just such nights as this one which he remembered. It was not often that Neckart looked back at that early time. He was neither morbid nor addicted to self-torture.

It has goaded countless multitudes of various creeds to endless forms of self-torture. The cities of India are full of cripples it has made. The hill-sides of Syria are riddled with holes, where miserable hermits, whose lives it had palsied, lived and died like the vermin they harbored.

A large party of monks fresh from Nitria, with ragged hair and beards, and the peculiar expression of countenance which fanatics of all creeds acquire, fierce and yet abject, self-conscious and yet ungoverned, silly and yet sly, with features coarsened and degraded by continual fasting and self-torture, prudishly shrouded from head to heel in their long ragged gowns, were gesticulating wildly and loudly, and calling on their more peaceable companions, in no measured terms, to revenge some insult offered to the Church.

It was a strange place for a lover's tryst that bare room with its lifeless occupant, flooded with white unearthly moonlight "Let me stay with you, Edward," she pleaded, with quivering lips. "No," she added, in answer to the unspoken fear in his eyes, "I shall not try to comfort you." She knew intuitively that no consolation could avail in this hour of silent self-torture.

From the date of that entry, this self-reproach and self-torture kept cropping up every now and then in the diary; and it appeared to have been not entirely without its influence in sending Staines to sea, though the main reason he gave was that his Rosa might have the comforts and luxuries she had enjoyed before she married him.

The sickness passed off like the preceding pain; but the sensation had of late been often felt by Brandon, and disregarded, for few persons were less afflicted with the self-torture of hypochondria; but now, that night, whether it was more keen than usual, or whether his thought had touched on the string that jars naturally on the most startling of human anticipations, we know not, but, as he resumed his seat, the idea of his approaching dissolution shot like an ice-bolt through his breast.

A devil seized Philip, a devil of self-torture which was always lurking within him, and, though with all his soul he wished that Griffiths and Mildred should not go away together, he could not help himself; he set himself to persuade Griffiths through her. "I don't see why not, if I'm willing," he said. "That's what I told him."

Its noisome condition was mainly owing to the presence of various fakirs, who, though still alive, were in advanced stages of putrefaction. Most people are supposed to go easily and pleasantly to the devil, but these elected to do so by way of a charnel-house asceticism, and an elaborate system of self-torture.

For by this time, though her sunken cheeks were hard to reconcile with the enjoyment of a summer holiday, she had matured a resolve to betray nothing of what she had gone through. Her state of mind resembled that of the ascetic who has arrived at a morbid delight in self-torture.