CAMBRIDGE
79
broke down entirely in health and had to lose a term and go home. I suffered from intermittent pulse and a variety of brain symptoms of an alarming kind. A mill seemed to be working inside my head ; I could not banish obsessing ideas ; at times I could hardly read a book, and found it painful even to look at a printed page. Fortunately, I did not suffer from sleeplessness, and my digestion failed but little. Even a brief interval of complete mental rest did me good, and it seemed as if a long dose of it might wholly restore me. I t would have been madness to continue the kind of studious life that I had been leading. I had been much too zealous, had worked too irregularly and in too many directions, and had done myself serious harm. It was as though I had tried to make a steam-engine perform more work than it was constructed for, by tampering with its safety valve and thereby straining its mechanism. Happily,
file 1h()d1y 11i; y srr ilcliiiie", rep"lir itself, which
the steam-engine cannot.
As it had become impossible for me to continue reading for mathematical honours, I abandoned all further intention of trying for them, and occupied part of my remaining time at Cambridge in attending medical lectures to fill up the necessary quota of attendances that should qualify for a medical degree. I spent my third long vacation in travelling with my sister Emma in Germany. We stayed some weeks in Dresden, where we joined the Hallams and accompanied them during a little further travel, and then I took my sister round by Vienna and back home. Those were days of travelling by voiturier and diligence.
