INDIGESTION AND NERVOUS DEPRESSION. 227 



increased, but that the quality is also improved. Perhaps for a short 

 time after his return he is hardly in a condition to do brain-work at 

 all. He sits down to his desk, but feels cramped in the unaccustomed 

 posture, and he would rather work off the superabundant energy within 

 him in a long walk or a stiff climb than restrain it with difficulty to 

 the simple task of driving a quill. After a week or two he settles 

 down and works steadily along with comfort and ease for a couple of 

 months or more, when he again begins to sink below par. His appre- 

 hension is no longer so acute, his power of concentration is diminished, 

 he can no longer fix his attention for any length of time upon one sub- 

 ject without a severe effort. His mental vision becomes less perspicu- 

 ous, his ideas succeed each other more slowly, and find expression 

 with greater difficulty, so that he communicates his thoughts with less 

 fluency and less clearness than before. His temper, too, undergoes a 

 change. Instead of regarding the daily occurrences of life with equa- 

 nimity, and making the best of what can not be helped, irritation so 

 Blight as to be unfelt at other times provokes him to anger or peevish- 

 ness, and even when he possesses sufficient self-control to restrain his 

 feelings and prevent them from being manifested outwardly, to the 

 annoyance of his friends or neighbors, the very effort of restraint 

 seems to increase the internal irritation, until at last it either explodes 

 in an ebullition of wrath on some comparatively trivial circumstance, 

 or tells upon the digestion and nervous functions of the individual 

 himself, diminishing the appetite or causing intense muscular weari- 

 ness. In others, again, we find that along with or taking the place of 

 irritability there is great mental depression. Everything is looked at 

 from a gloomy point of view himself, his friends, and his surround- 

 ings. He does not feel equal to his work ; nothing that he does 

 pleases him; he is apt to become distrustful of himself and jealous of 

 others ; apt to think that his friends are slighting him, or to fancy 

 that he has offended them. Even when all external circumstances 

 leave nothing to be desired, the unfortunate victim can not enjoy life. 

 His mind is occupied Avith gloomy forebodings of miseries to come, or 

 he becomes a prey to melancholy and depression without any apparent 

 reason. This melancholy weighs most deeply upon him during the 

 night, and if he happens to wake in the small hours of the morning, as 

 he not unfrequently does, life seems not worth living, but a burden of 

 which he would willingly be quit. Melancholy is at times associated 

 with sleeplessness, and then the two evils react upon and increase each 

 other. For this causeless sorrow has a similar effect to that of real 

 sorrow. As Shakespeare says : 



" Sorrow's weight doth heavier grow, 

 Through debt that bankrupt sleep doth sorrow owe." 



At other times instead of sleeplessness there is an abnormal ten- 

 dency to drowsiness, which sometimes comes on almost irresistibly at 



