e air was, at best, greatly confined; but it was
particularly so to the poor patient, who lay panting as if in a dying
condition.

Yet I soon saw, and, as it were, instinctively, that he was not likely
to die immediately. Some adventitious cause was evidently operating to
throw his brain and nervous system into an abnormal condition, nor was I
long in determining what it was. The father was a farmer. He possessed
immense orchards, and made great quantities of cider, and one of his
neighbors owned a distillery. For every barrel of cider Mr. J. carried
to the distillery, he received in return a certain amount of
cider-brandy; and at the time when I was called to see Hezekiah, he had
more than two barrels of this "precious commodity" in his cellar. At the
close of autumn he had had three barrels.

Why this deposit of an article so doubtful? And what had become of the
one barrel which had disappeared? Not a member of the family would touch
it, but Mr. J. himself, and Hezekiah. The women and children did,
indeed, sometimes taste a little molasses toddy, as it was called. Mr.
J. would prepare it and pass it round in the morning just before
breakfast, in the hope and expectation that all would taste it; and they
usually did so. It was not, however, quite a voluntary thing on their
part, but a species of moral compulsion. Left entirely to themselves,
they never would have tasted it.

Now think, reader, of two persons in a family, with two or three barrels
of brandy at their entire disposal, with the expectation of consuming
it, or the far greater part of it, during autumn and winter. Why, three
barrels are more than a quart a day, for every day of the year. Mr. J.
drank freely; but not more freely than his son. The latter was treading
in the steps of his father, with the almost certain prospect of going,
in the end, quite beyond him.

It was not difficult to prescribe for the young man. The far greater
difficulty was to induce him to follow out the prescription. I was
honest enough to tell the father what ailed the son, and what ought to
be done, and to plead with him to change his own habits immediately. I
could not, it is true, quite prevail, when I urged him to pour his
brandy, the whole of it, into the street; for that, as he said and
doubtless thought, would be a waste of property. But he _did_ promise to
_sell_ it; though even this promise he never kept. He even continued to
drink it; though as he always insisted, wit