ant voice woke me up again.

My case grew more and more serious every day. A Plain gin was
recommended; I took it. Then gin and molasses; I took that also. Then
gin and onions; I added the onions, and took all three. I detected no
particular result, however, except that I had acquired a breath like a
buzzard's.

I found I had to travel for my health. I went to Lake Bigler with my
reportorial comrade, Wilson. It is gratifying to me to reflect that we
traveled in considerable style; we went in the Pioneer coach, and my
friend took all his baggage with him, consisting of two excellent silk
handkerchiefs and a daguerreotype of his grandmother. We sailed and
hunted and fished and danced all day, and I doctored my cough all night.
By managing in this way, I made out to improve every hour in the
twenty-four. But my disease continued to grow worse.

A sheet-bath was recommended. I had never refused a remedy yet, and it
seemed poor policy to commence then; therefore I determined to take a
sheet-bath, notwithstanding I had no idea what sort of arrangement it
was. It was administered at midnight, and the weather was very frosty.
My breast and back were bared, and a sheet (there appeared to be a
thousand yards of it) soaked in ice-water, was wound around me until I
resembled a swab for a Columbiad.

It is a cruel expedient. When the chilly rag touches one's warm flesh,
it makes him start with sudden violence, and gasp for breath just as men
do in the death-agony. It froze the marrow in my bones and stopped the
beating of my heart. I thought my time had come.

Young Wilson said the circumstance reminded him of an anecdote about a
negro who was being baptized, and who slipped from the parson's grasp,
and came near being drowned. He floundered around, though, and finally
rose up out of the water considerably strangled and furiously angry, and
started ashore at once, spouting water like a whale, and remarking, with
great asperity, that "one o' dese days some gen'l'man's nigger gwyne to
get killed wid jis' such damn foolishness as dis!"

Never take a sheet-bath-never. Next to meeting a lady acquaintance who,
for reasons best known to herself, don't see you when she looks at you,
and don't know you when she does see you, it is the most uncomfortable
thing in the world.

But, as I was saying, when the sheet-bath failed to cure my cough,
a lady friend recommended the application of a mustard plaster to my
breast. I