He has told with unsparing exactness the story of his attempts to kill himself.

In his youth his father had unwisely given him a treatise in favour of suicide to read, and when he argued against it, had listened to his reasonings in a silence which he construed as sympathy with the writer, though it seems to have been only unwillingness to think too badly of the state of a departed friend.

This now recurred to his mind, and talk with casual companions in taverns and chophouses was enough in his present condition to confirm him in his belief that self-destruction was lawful.

Evidently he was perfectly insane, for he could not take up a newspaper without reading in it a fancied libel on himself.

First he bought laudanum, and had gone out into the fields with the intention of swallowing it, when the love of life suggested another way of escaping the dreadful ordeal.