He slept poorly nights, notwithstanding he sought to regulate his dreams by giving himself strong suggestions before sleeping. But when he awoke, he had dreamed that he was a whistling buoy that had torn lose, and drifted and drifted seeking a strand upon which to be thrown. And in his sleep he had unconsciously sought support against the sideboard of the bed to feel contact with some object, even if a dead one. Sometimes he dreamed, that he fluttered in the air and could neither go up nor down; and when he finally awoke after a fainting attack he had grasped his hands round the pillow on which he had lain his head. Now the memory of his dead mother began to come up, and he awoke often from dreaming that he had lain as a child on her breast. His soul was plainly in retrogression, and the memory of the mother the source, the link between unconscious and conscious life, the consoler, the interceder, came forth. Childhood's thoughts of meeting again in another world came up, and his first plan of suicide expressed itself as an irresistible longing to find again his mother somewhere in another world, which he did not believe in.
All science was useless to a spirit going downwards, and which had lost all interest in life; the brain had battled, until tired, and the fantasy labored without a regulator.
Still he kept up until it was near Christmas; but he ate little and took only ether at night. The whole life disgusted him, and he smiled now at his former ambitions. The rain had destroyed his books and papers; the apparatus had corroded and rusted.
The care of his own person had lessened, so that his whiskers had grown, his hair remained unkempt, and he shunned water. He had not sent his linen to be laundried for a long time, and he had lost the ability to see dirt.
His clothes lacked buttons, and his coat was always spotted in front from things spilt, for the hand that managed knife and fork no longer obeyed the will.
When he went out sometimes, the children stood and made faces at him and called him nicknames.
One morning he had the whole swarm of children around him. They pulled his coat, and when he turned back, a stone was thrown, which hit his chin so that the blood ran. Then he began to weep and begged them not to be cross with him.
"Yes, you shall go away, you devilish fool," cried a boy of twelve years, "lest we shall get you to the almshouse."
And so they all threw stones. But then Oman's maid came out and took the boy by the hair, and when she had chastised him, she went to the assailed and wiped the blood from his face with her apron.
"Poor little man!" said she.