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until long after seventy he bounded upstairs like a boy, two or three steps at a time.
In 1895 and again in 1901, he gave a course of lectures at Western Reserve University, and in one week he records speaking every day. Overwork finally brought its penalty, and in the autumn of 1895 he was sentenced to confinement in his room and a milk diet.
This trying illness lasted for a year, during which he wrote his ‘
Cheerful Yesterdays’ propped up with pillows.
On Christmas Day he wrote to his friends at the
Cambridge Public Library:—
I am moving slowly along and have now held out to me the munificent offer of a raw egg, which seems a whole Christmas dinner after eight weeks of milk-cure! . . . Some people think I write better than formerly, in my horizontal attitude!
On the cover of the diary for 1896, he wrote:—
“Now that I begin to know a little, I die.”
St. Augustine.
And within the covers are these entries:—
Jan. 6.
For 10 weeks to-morrow I have had absolutely no nourishment but milk. . . . I have done a great deal of reading and writing on this and some talking.
Jan. 13.
Per contra, had to give up the hope of working on the history in bed. I cannot handle the wide sheets or heavy books.
It is a great disappointment.
