Never knowing what may happen to them, never knowing what they may do to others.

Always suffering, always hopeless! Treated as criminals till their deeds are fatal, then certified to be "criminal lunatics." Such is the life of the underworld epileptic.

Life, did I call it ?--let me withdraw that word; it is the awful, protracted agony of a living death, in which sanity struggles with madness, rending and wounding a poor human frame.

Happy are they when they die young! but even epileptics live on and on; but while they live we consign them to the underworld, where their pitiful cry of "Woe! woe!" resounds.
Do not say this is an exaggeration, for it is less than truth, not beyond it.

Poe himself, with all his imagination and power, could not do full justice to this matter.
Mendicity societies in their report tell of cunning rascals who impose on the public by simulating "fits"; they tell of the "king of fits," the "soap fits king," and others.