Her insanity absolutely disappeared, she returned to healthy activity in her old vocation as teacher, and the year after, to my great annoyance, married her former fiance.  I was angry with her, not for marrying, but for marrying him after his shameful treatment of her.  She seemed to me, and to her family also, to have thrown herself away on a man who had proved himself utterly unworthy any woman’s devotion.  All my chivalry, too, seemed wasted, and the only result of the experiment was the dissipation of an ideal, the naive expectation of the vicarious penalty to which I had in my sincerity offered myself having passed away.  Convinced, that I had cured her, I was indignant at having cured her for him, but I suffered no visitation of contempt for women, and my indignation was the deepest feeling that remained from the experience, except the literary impulse born of the persistent effort to interest her in my correspondence and the consequent search for material for letters in the details of college life and the nature around us; and the habit of noticing and memorizing what might be of interest to others in the most trivial incidents of life never quite left me.  I became a profuse letter-writer from inclination, and, though all the letters of that part of my life and for years after were recalled and burnt scrupulously, I am convinced that what literary ability I possess is in a great degree owing to the impulse I received in that romantic attachment.

What was, perhaps, more important, was that the vicarious offering of myself, made in my morbid enthusiasm, and the commonplace result of it, hastened the end of that phase of my religious experience.  It was only because my boyhood had been frozen up in those seven years of apathy and began to thaw out in later years, when manhood should have been taking the reins, that all that passage of childhood and unsophisticated devotion intruded in the wrong place, to fill up the void in the formation.  My religious status, as well as my conception of life, were only advanced to where they should have been at an earlier period.

Atheism was at that time beginning to work strongly among the students, and in opposition to it there began an antagonistic evangelical movement, with prayer-meetings amongst those religiously inclined.  In my class, at this time, were several who became in after life eminent in clerical activity, and amongst them were the brothers Nevius, distinguished in the missionary service in the far East.  I had no liking for the prayer-meetings of the students, but I joined the movement for holding religious services in the city almshouse, a primitive institution which had no chaplain, and where were sent not only the incurably poor and the incurably sick, but the idiots and half-witted, as well as the temporarily incapacitated poor, who would have been, in a better and more complete social organization, sent to a hospital, which did not exist in Schenectady.  With several other students and