mere exhibition of some mystic powder
or pill or tincture--or, at best, a few drops of some irritant or
poison. It is their ignorance that makes their physicians' and
apothecaries' bills so heavy, and the grave-digger's calling so good and
so certain."

It is hardly necessary for me to say that I followed the advice which
had been so wisely given, and which, after all, was but the echo of my
own judgment, when that judgment was freely exercised. My friends were
not satisfied at first; but when they saw that I was slowly recovering,
they submitted with as good a grace as they could. The fact was that
they had no court of appeal. They had selected a man who was at the head
of his profession, and whose voice, in the medical world, and as a
medical man, wherever he was known, was law. Had some young man given
such "old woman's" advice, as they would most certainly have regarded
it, they would have appealed to a higher court.

No man ever did better, when placed in similar circumstances, with the
aid of medicine, than I did without it. In two weeks, at farthest, I was
as well as I had been at any time in ten years or even twenty. What more
or greater could I have asked? What more could my friends have expected?
What more could have been possible? Could Hippocrates or Galen have done
more?

CHAPTER LVI.

BUTTER EATERS.

About the year 1833, I became somewhat intimately acquainted with the
dietetic and general physical habits of a young woman in a family where
I was a boarder, whose case will be instructive.

She was about twenty-five years of age, and resided in a family that had
adopted her as their own, her parents being unknown. She possessed a
good natural constitution; and was, for the most part, of good habits.
If there was any considerable defect of constitution, it consisted in a
predominance of the biliary and lymphatic over the nervous and sanguine
temperaments. Yet she was not wholly wanting in that susceptibility, not
to say activity, which the sanguine temperament is wont to impart. But
the same necessity which is so often the mother of invention, is also
sometimes the progenitor of a good share of activity; and this was, in a
remarkable degree, the lot of Miss Powell.

Although her skin was not by any means fair, it was not a bad skin. It
was firm in its structure, and very little susceptible of those slight
but ever recurring diseased conditions in which persons of a sanguine
temperament so of