some enthusiasm, your daily
sea-bath. But I have been privately assured, by the other boarders, that
the bath in question always consisted of putting on a neat bathing-dress
and sitting awhile on a rock among the sea-weed, like an insane merman,
with the highest waves submerging only your knees, while the younger
Dolorosi splashed and gambolled in safe shallows behind you. Even that
is better than nothing, but--Soul of Mohammed!--is that called bathing?
Verily, we are, as the Turks declare, a nation of "dirty Franks," if
this be the accepted definition.

Can it be possible that you really hold with the once-celebrated Mr.
Walker, "The Original," as he was deservedly called, who maintained,
that, by a correct diet, the system became self-purifying, through an
active exhalation which repelled impurity,--so that, while walking on
dusty roads, his feet, and even his stockings, remained free from dust?
"By way of experiment, I did not wash my face for a week; nor did any
one see, nor I feel, the difference." My deluded friend, it is a fatal
error. Mr. Walker, the Original, may have been inwardly a saint and a
sage, but it is impossible that his familiar society could have been
desirable, even to fools or sinners. Rather recall, from your early
explorations in Lempriere's Dictionary, how Medea renewed the youth of
Pelias by simply cutting him to pieces and boiling him; whereon my Lord
Bacon justly remarks, that "there may be some boiling required in the
matter, but the cutting to pieces is not needful." If you find that the
water-cure agrees with your constitution, I rejoice in it; I should
think it would; but, I implore you, do not leave it all behind you when
you leave the institution. When you return to your family, use your very
first dollars for buying a sponge and a tin-hat, for each member of the
household; and bring up the five children to lead decent lives.

Then, again, consider the fact that our lungs were created to consume
oxygen. I suppose that never in your life, Dolorosus, did those
breathing organs of yours inhale more than one half the quantity of air
that they were intended to take in,--to say nothing of its quality. Yet
one would think, that, in the present high prices of other food, you
would make the most of the only thing you can put into your mouth
gratis. Here is Nature constantly urging on us an unexceptionable
atmosphere forty miles high,--for if a pressure of fourteen pounds to
the square inch is