"The discoverer would have to be killed." This is the thought with which my mental torment subsides into sleep about the time of sunrise.
We have commenced a cold-water cure. I have changed my room, and have fairly quiet nights now, although not without relapses.
One evening the doctor sees the breviary lying on my table, and becomes angry and excited. "Always this religion! That is also a symptom, don't you know?"
"Or a necessity like other necessities!"
"Enough! I am no atheist, but I think the Almighty does not wish to be addressed in such intimate terms as formerly. These flatteries of the Deity belong to the past, and personally I agree with the Mohammedans, who only ask for the gift of resignation in order to support the burden Destiny imposes upon them with dignity."
Significant words, from which I extract some grains of gold for myself. He carries away my breviary and Bible, and says: "Read indifferent matters of secondary interest, world histories, or mythologies, and leave idle dreaming. Above all things, beware of occultism, that caricature of science. It is forbidden to us to spy out the Creator's secrets, and woe to them who seek to do so!"
On my objecting that the occultists in Paris form a whole body by themselves, he only says, "All the worse for them." In the evening he brings me, without any ulterior purpose, I am sure, Victor Rydberg's German Mythology.
"Here is something to send you to sleep, standing. It is better than sulphonal."
If my good friend had known what a spark he was throwing into a keg of powder, he would rather——