dered bathing in river instead of spring water, he
said, "Because it is warmed by the sun."

"True, yet not so much but it has to be warmed still more."

Not posed in the least, Mesmer replied, "The reason why the water which
is exposed to the rays of the sun is superior to all other water is
because it is magnetized. I myself magnetized the sun some twenty years
ago!"

Yet the name of Mesmer has founded a system, while that of Dumoulin,
who, with simple wisdom, observed, on dying, that he left behind him two
great physicians, Regimen and River-water, has gained but a scanty fame.

Says Boswell, "At least be well if you are not ill"; but the dear public
is always ill. In our own country, with an apparently healthy pulse, it
has drank the worth of a marble palace in sarsaparilla, and has built a
hotel out of Brandreth's pills. It has fairly reeled on Schiedam
Schnapps; and even the infant has his little popularities, having passed
from catnip and caraway to Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup. There is never
a time when the public will not declare upon any well-advertised remedy
its belief in the motto of the German doctors, "We do cure everything
but death."

It is often interesting to note the various phases which invalidism
takes on. Sometimes one seems folded in a dense dream,--has gone away
almost beyond one's own pity, and has not been heard from for months. It
is to be hoped that friends who hunt "the greyhound and turtle-dove"
will meet the missing, and duly report. Meantime one resides in a
mummified state,--a dim thinkingness that may be discovered when another
coming in says with vigor the thing one had long thought without quite
knowing it; in this demi-semi-consciousness it had never pecked through
the shell. This looks very imbecile, and is charitably treated to be
only called invalid.

Is it mere helplessness that one lies so remote from all but surface
sensation, day after day gazing at the address of letters that come,
with a passive wonder of how soon she is to vacate her name? Also a
friend calls to say that to-morrow he travels afar. It seems then that
he will be too much missed, and the parting has its share of unutterable
longing. But by the morrow it is not the one left who is sorry. The new
sun shines on an earth miles off from yesterday. The night has given
many windings more in the folds of this resigned mummy, that now lies
securely as an insect in a leaf. Given the beloved hand, and all things