"Not fear, but what I call nervousness,--unreasoning, but irresistible; as when, for instance, one, looking at the sun going down, says: 'I will count fifty before it disappears,' and as he goes on and it becomes doubtful whether he will reach the number, he gets strangely flurried, and his imagination pictures life and death and heaven and hell as the issues depending on the completion or non-completion of the fifty he is counting." If a man can describe it all so well, what could a woman do?
I fear that her description would be too graphic to be read by us, her sisters.
Many people have a way of saying of a sufferer: "There is nothing the matter with her.

She is only excessively nervous." This "only" is a very serious matter.

There is no illness more difficult to treat and more trying to bear than nervous prostration.
It is a slowly advancing malady which is scarcely recognized as serious by one's friends until the tired mind succumbs and mental aberration is the terrible finale of the seemingly slight indisposition.
My readers may wonder why I dwell upon a subject that baffles even the most eminent physicians in the country.

It is because I feel that each of us women has in herself the only check to the nervousness which we all dread.

We, as Americans, cannot afford to trifle with our unfortunate inheritance, but must use every means at our command to subjugate the evil instead of being subjugated by it.