CHAPTER X.

PASSAGES FROM THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THE WANDERING JEW.





"'I have at length been ill, very ill, once more, and for many
reasons foreign to the weightiest, which I had forgotten, I had
hoped that I was going to die. But therein I am as usual deceived
and disappointed. That I have been out of my mind I know, by having
returned to the real knowledge of what I am. The conscious present
has again fallen together and made a whole with the past, and that
whole is my personal identity.

"'How I broke loose from the bonds of a madness, which, after so
many and heavy years of uninterrupted sanity, had at length laid
hold upon me, I will now relate.

"'I had, as I have said, been very ill--with some sort of fever that
had found fit rooting in a brain overwearied, from not having been
originally constructed to last so long. Whether it came not of an
indwelling demon, or a legion of demons, I cannot tell--God knows.
Surely I was as one possessed. I was mad, whether for years, or but