After more than 25 years of fearing everything from storms to insanity, I sat down with myself one evening and took stock. No storm had harmed me, and I wasn’t in an asylum. Fear had proved a failure. So I decided to turn to hope and confidence. It wasn’t as easy as it sounds, but with the aid of experience, from which too many of us do not profit, the results had been increasingly gratifying. I believe in myself, not arrogantly but rather humbly, as a physical, mental, and spiritual machine which, properly fed and cared for and duly restrained, can, in some measure, produce mutual benefits.