ry medicine, whose virtues she had dared to
discourse upon, she ventured to set aside, when her experience assured
her it was not producing the effect she desired, and for which she
supposed it was intended. So that what, from the first, I had feared,
and more than I had feared, at length happened. She took my medicine,
professedly,--that is, just when she pleased,--for about four weeks, to
no manner of purpose whatever, except to deceive herself; for during the
first and second weeks of its use, she imagined herself all the while
getting better; while during the third week she began to doubt, and
about the fourth week she came to the sage conclusion that she was just
where she had been a month or two before.

The great, abiding difficulties of her case--her want of simple,
confiding trust in her physician, and her constant, anxious attention to
her own internal sensations, were far enough from being overcome. She
was, in short, very nearly where she was ten years before, except that
she was in circumstances rather more difficult to be reached, and had
become rather more sceptical about medicine.

What should now be done? Must the case be abandoned? Or was there some
other way, some _new_ way, by means, of which it could be reached? I was
not quite willing to give her up as irrecoverable, and yet I saw nothing
remaining which I could do. I revolved the thing in my mind, by night
and by day. At last a plan struck me which I verily believed would
succeed.

A few miles distant was a young physician, just from the schools, who
vainly, though naturally, supposed he knew almost every thing which was
known, and who wanted business. As he had nothing to lose, even if he
were to fail in a hundred trials, but every thing to gain could he
effect one very remarkable cure, I proposed to the family to employ him.
I knew well he would have one or two advantages over his older and more
experienced brethren. He would not at once place himself on the same
platform with his patient and the friends, by answering their numerous
questions; and for this plain and simple reason: In the first place,
that he _could_ not, and very probably knew his own weakness; secondly,
he would have more of that blind faith in medicine which inspires the
ignorant with confidence.

But there was another thought beyond all this, a wheel within a wheel.
The young physician might succeed better than I, in drawing her
thoughts, and even her affections, away fro