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His voice, especially when he spoke in public, was high and shrill. His health was uniformly strong until his last year, when he became subject to epileptic fits. He was a great bather, and scrupulously clean in all his habits, abstemious in his food, and careless in what it consisted, rarely or never touching wine, and noting sobriety as the highest of qualities when describing any new people.
As a result, the boy grows thin, pale, morose and passionate; then weak, indolent and indifferent; his digestion becomes impaired, his sleep short, disturbed and broken; he sometimes becomes epileptic or falls into a state of marasmus; in any case he is in great danger of being totally ruined forever. There is a great difference in boys regarding the formation of these habits.
According to their teaching, if a consumptive or a murderer or an epileptic asks your daughter in marriage, you must let him have her. If crêtins go to war against the physically and mentally healthy, don't defend yourselves.
The baggage of the common soldier at this stage of the war would have thrown an ordinary quartermaster of latter day service into an epileptic fit, it was so ponderous in size and enormous in quantities a perfect household outfit. A few days before this the soldier had received his first two months' pay, all in new crisp bank notes, fresh from the State banks or banks of deposit.
As the water cooled he would turn the hot-water faucet until he raised the temperature of his bathroom to such a degree that the reader could neither bear it any longer, nor see to read. Not until then would he permit the door to be opened. It has been said that he was subject to epileptic attacks after his first campaign in Italy.
The same evening Cambyses was seized by one of his old epileptic attacks. Two days later he gave Nebenchari permission to embalm Nitetis' body in the Egyptian manner, according to her last wish. The king gave way to the most immoderate grief; he tore the flesh of his arms, rent his clothes and strewed ashes on his head, and on his couch.
Guthrie now conversed in low tones. Once in a while I could catch a scrap of the conversation "not an epileptic," "no abnormal conformation of the head," "certain mental defects," "often the result of sickness or accident." "Every time that woman appeared there was a most peculiar disturbance," remarked Dr. Guthrie as Kennedy took the roll of paper from him and studied it carefully.
In the morning she had ceased to be the epileptic shape, but the risk of re-transformation had hovered near her, and the intimidation of it was such that she had wept, aghast and broken as much by the future as by the past. She had been discovered weeping.... Later, the phrase 'nervous breakdown' had lodged in her confused memory. The doctor had been very matter-of-fact, logical, and soothing.
But now the wine had precisely the opposite effect, and brought such tormenting thoughts, that, worn out as he was already by epileptic fits and his habit of drinking, both body and mind threatened to give way to the agitation caused by the events of the last months. Burning and shivering by turns, he was at last forced to lie down.
Tales of Robin Hood began to take shape. The by-ways and thickets were peopled with men, innocent or guilty, but all alike desperate. One Richard, we read, whose fellow at the plough fell dead in an epileptic fit, fled in terror of the judges to the woods, and so did many a worse man than Richard.
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