ieve
that the very best thing that could be done for you at this moment,
you unfortunate individual, would be to buy you a saddle-horse and a
revolver, and start you tomorrow for the Rocky Mountains, with distinct
instructions to treat any man as a Border Ruffian who should venture to
allude to the subject of disease in your presence.

But I cannot venture to hope that you will do anything so reasonable.
The fascinations of your present life are too overwhelming; when an
invalid once begins to enjoy the contemplation of his own woes, as you
appear to do, it is all over with him. Besides, you urge, and perhaps
justly, that your case has already gone too far, for so rough a tonic.
What, then, can I do for you? Medicine I cannot offer; for even your
respectable family-physician occasionally hints that you need something
different from that. I suspect that all rational advice for you may be
summed up in one prescription: Reverse instantly all the habits of your
previous physical existence, and there may be some chance for you. But,
perhaps, I had better enter more into detail.

Do not think that I am going to recur to the painful themes of doughnuts
and diet. I fear my hints, already given, on those subjects, may wound
the sensitive nature of Mrs. D., who suffers now such utter martyrdom
from your condition that I cannot bring myself to heap further coals
of fire on her head, even though the coals be taken from her own very
ineffectual cooking-stove. Let me dwell rather on points where you
have exclusive jurisdiction, and can live wisely or foolishly, at your
pleasure.

It does not depend on you, perhaps, whether you shall eat bread or
saleratus, meat or sole-leather; but it certainly does depend upon
yourself whether you shall wash yourself daily. I do not wish to be
personal, but I verily believe, O companion of my childhood! that,
until you began to dabble in Hydropathy, you had not bestowed a sincere
ablution upon your entire person since the epoch when, twenty years ago,
we took our last plunge together, off Titcomb's wharf, in our native
village. That in your well-furnished house there are no hydraulic
privileges beyond pint water-pitchers, I know from anxious personal
inspection. I know that you have spent an occasional week at the
sea-shore during the summer, and that many people prefer to do up their
cleanliness for the year during these excursions; indeed, you yourself
have mentioned to me, at such times, with