A very ingenious and elegant young lady, with light eyes and hair, about the age of seventeen, in other respects well, was suddenly seized soon after her usual menstruation with this very wonderful malady.  The disease began with vehement convulsions of almost every muscle of her body, with great but vain efforts to vomit, and the most violent hiccoughs, that can be conceived:  these were succeeded in about an hour with a fixed spasm; in which one hand was applied to her head, and the other to support it:  in about half an hour these ceased, and the reverie began suddenly, and was at first manifest by the look of her eyes and countenance, which seemed to express attention.  Then she conversed aloud with imaginary persons with her eyes open, and could not for about an hour be brought to attend to the stimulus of external objects by any kind of violence, which it was proper to use; these symptoms returned in this order every day for five or six weeks.

These conversations were quite consistent, and we could understand, what she supposed her imaginary companions to answer, by the continuation of her part of the discourse.  Sometimes she was angry, at other times shewed much wit and vivacity, but was most frequently inclined to melancholy.  In these reveries she sometimes sung over some music with accuracy, and repeated whole pages from the English poets.  In repeating some lines from Mr. Pope’s works she had forgot one word, and began again, endeavouring to recollect it; when she came to the forgotten word, it was shouted aloud in her ear, and this repeatedly, to no purpose; but by many trials she at length regained it herself.

These paroxysms were terminated with the appearance of inexpressible surprise, and great fear, from which she was some minutes in recovering herself, calling on her sister with great agitation, and very frequently underwent a repetition of convulsions, apparently from the pain of fear.  See Sect.  XVII. 3. 7.

After having thus returned for about an hour every day for two or three weeks, the reveries seemed to become less complete, and some of their circumstances varied; so that she could walk about the room in them without running against any of the furniture; though these motions were at first very unsteady and tottering.  And afterwards she once drank a dish of tea, when the whole apparatus of the tea-table was set before her; and expressed some suspicion, that a medicine was put into it, and once seemed to smell of a tuberose, which was in flower in her chamber, and deliberated aloud about breaking it from the stem, saying, “it would make her sister so charmingly angry.”  At another time in her melancholy moments she heard the sound of a passing bell, “I wish I was dead,” she cried, listening to the bell, and then taking off one of her shoes, as she sat upon the bed, “I love the colour black,” says she, “a little wider, and a little longer, even this might make me a coffin!”—­Yet it is evident, she