on of the mind; for his imagination, drawing a
morbid _pabulum_ from his disease, grew stronger and stronger in its
capacity to invest the images he gloated over with more fearful
characteristics, till often, as I was informed, he started up in the
middle of the night and screamed out that he was in the present act of
suffering again all he had already experienced. But what struck me as
still more remarkable in this victim, was, that any change that took
place upon him for the better, in respect of his physical economy, was,
while accompanied by a partial release from the domination of his old
fancies, generally attended by a kind of new-born desire for another and
a new supply of his stimulant visions. This discovery I made one day,
when, as I felicitated myself on having effected a confirmation of his
nerves, by the application of a course of tonics, I told him that I
myself was on the eve of encountering all the unpleasant feelings
attendant upon the performance of a painful operation on a very
beautiful patient, whose life might too likely fall a sacrifice to her
desire to get quit of a mortal disease. His eye brightened, he held out
his hands, and supplicated me to allow him to be present, under the
assumed character of a surgeon. My refusal produced disappointment and
chagrin; and he often afterwards harped on the cruelty of my resolution
to discomfit him. He afterwards went to another part of the country to
reside with his relations; and the last notice I had of him was, that he
was seen bending his skeleton body over the blackened corpses of several
individuals who had been burnt to death in the conflagration of a large
dwelling-house in the town where he resided.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF WILLIE SMITH.

If I thocht the world would tak the least interest in the matter, I wad
tell it the where an' the when o' my birth, in conformity wi' auld use
an' wont in the case o' biographical sketches; but, takin it for granted
that the world cares as little about me as I care about it--an', Gude
kens, that's little aneuch, thanks to the industry o' my faither, that
made me independent o't!--I shall merely say, wi' regard to the
particulars above alluded to, that I was born in a certain thrivin,
populous bit touny in the south, an' that I am, at this present writin,
somewhat aulder than I was yesterday. I dinna choose to be mair
particular on the point, because I dinna see that my age has onything
mair to do wi' my story,