For years the child remained ailing and delicate, requiring the tenderest care, but those weeks of anguish left a deeper trace on mother than on child.

Once she was out of danger I collapsed physically, and lay in bed for a week unmoving, and then rose to face a struggle which lasted for three years and two months, and nearly cost me my life, the struggle which transformed me from a Christian into an Atheist.

The agony of the struggle was in the first nineteen months--a time to be looked back upon with shrinking, as it was a hell to live through at the time.

For no one who has not felt it knows the fearful anguish inflicted by doubt on the earnestly religious soul.

There is in life no other pain so horrible, so keen in its torture, so crushing in its weight.