her ways? People are not wholly
ignorant on this great subject. Would they but _do_ as well as they
_know_, the fatal igniting spark would be much oftener and longer
withheld; and, indeed, in many instances, would never prove the
immediate cause of dissolution. The lamp of life would burn
on--_sometimes, it may be, rather feebly_--till its oil was wholly
exhausted, as it always ought. Man has no more occasion, as a matter of
necessity, to die of consumption, than the lamp or the candle.

This, if true,--and is it not?--should be most welcome intelligence in a
country where, at some seasons and in particular localities, one-fourth
of all who die, perish of this disease. In March, 1856, twenty-one
persons out of eighty who died in Boston in a single week, were reported
as having died of consumption; and in June of the same year, the
proportion was nearly as great. In Newton, a few miles from Boston, the
proportion for the last ten years has been also about one in four.

But place the proportion for the whole northern United States, at one in
five only, or even one in six. Yet even at this rate, the annual
mortality for New York or New England, must be about twelve or fourteen
thousand. Yet it seems to excite little if any surprise. But when or
where has the cholera, the yellow fever, or the plague depopulated a
country of three millions of people, for each succeeding year, at the
rate of twelve thousand annually, or one hundred and twenty thousand
every ten years?

One reason why the statements I have made, of the possible postponement
of consumptive disease, should be most welcome intelligence, is found in
the fact that they inspire with the hope of _living_. The ordinary
expectation that those who inherit a consumptive tendency must die
prematurely, has been fatal to thousands. Mankind, in more respects than
one, tend to become what they are taken to be. If we take them to be
early destined to the tomb, they go there almost inevitably. There is, I
grant, one most fortunate drawback upon this tendency. Most people who
have the truly consumptive character, are disposed to disbelieve it.
They are generally "buoyant and hopeful," which, in some degree,
neutralizes the effect of sombre faces, and grave and prognosticating
jeremiades.

It will not be out of place to present the patient reader with an
anecdote, which may or may not be true, but which I received as truth
from the people of the neighborhood where the facts w