tion.
This piece of advice, if followed, may be worth from three to five years
of the fourscore which you hope to attain.

If, on the other hand, instead of going about cheerily in society, making
the best of everything and as far as possible forgetting your troubles,
you can make up your mind to economize all your stores of vital energy,
to hoard your life as a miser hoards his money, you will stand a fair
chance of living until you are tired of life,--fortunate if everybody is
not tired of you.

One of my prescriptions for longevity may startle you somewhat. It is
this: Become the subject of a mortal disease. Let half a dozen doctors
thump you, and knead you, and test you in every possible way, and render
their verdict that you have an internal complaint; they don't know
exactly what it is, but it will certainly kill you by and by. Then bid
farewell to the world and shut yourself up for an invalid. If you are
threescore years old when you begin this mode of life, you may very
probably last twenty years, and there you are,--an octogenarian. In the
mean time, your friends outside have been dropping off, one after
another, until you find yourself almost alone, nursing your mortal
complaint as if it were your baby, hugging it and kept alive by it,--if
to exist is to live. Who has not seen cases like this,--a man or a woman
shutting himself or herself up, visited by a doctor or a succession of
doctors (I remember that once, in my earlier experience, I was the
twenty-seventh physician who had been consulted), always taking medicine,
until everybody was reminded of that impatient speech of a relative of
one of these invalid vampires who live on the blood of tired-out
attendants, "I do wish she would get well--or something"? Persons who
are shut up in that way, confined to their chambers, sometimes to their
beds, have a very small amount of vital expenditure, and wear out very
little of their living substance. They are like lamps with half their
wicks picked down, and will continue to burn when other lamps have used
up all their oil. An insurance office might make money by taking no
risks except on lives of persons suffering from mortal disease. It is on
this principle of economizing the powers of life that a very eminent
American physician,--Dr. Weir Mitchell, a man of genius,--has founded his
treatment of certain cases of nervous exhaustion.

What have I got to say about temperance, the use of animal food, and so
forth?