gush forth as it
pleased. It is a prescription which I have not yet hazarded. I might do
so in some circumstances, when I was sure of being aided by that almost
omnipotent determination of which I have elsewhere spoken. I might do it
occasionally; but it would be a rare combination of circumstances that
would compel me. I might do it in the case of a resolute sea captain,
who insisted on it, would not take _no_ for an answer, and would assume
the whole responsibility. I might and would do it for such a man as Dr.
Kane.

I have, myself, bled slightly at the lungs; but while I did not, on the
one hand, allow myself to be half frightened to death, I did not, on the
other hand, dare to meet the hemorrhagic tendency by any violent
measures; not even by the motion of a trotting horse. I preferred the
alternative of moderate exercise in the open air, with a recumbent
position in a cool room, having my body well protected by needful
additional clothing, with deep breathing to expand gently my chest, and
general cheerfulness. But I have treated on this subject--my own general
experience--at sufficient length elsewhere.

CHAPTER LVIII.

POISONING BY A PAINTED PAIL.

A child about a week old, but naturally very sensitive and irritable,
became, one night, unusually restless and rather feverish, with
derangement of the bowels. The condition of the latter was somewhat
peculiar, and I was not a little puzzled to account for it. There was
nothing in the condition of the mother which seemed to me adequate to
the production of such effects. She was as healthy as delicate females
usually are in similar circumstances.

The derangement of the child's bowels continued and increased, and I was
more and more puzzled. Was it any thing, I said to myself, which was
imbibed or received from the mother? Just at the time, I happened to be
reading what Dr. Whitlaw, a foreign medical writer, says of the effects
which sometimes follow when cows that are suckling calves feed on
buttercup. The poison of the latter, as he says, instead of injuring the
cow herself, affects, most seriously, the calf, and, in some few
instances, destroys it. This led me to search more perseveringly than I
had before done, for a cause of so much bowel-disturbance in my young
patient.

At length I found that a wooden pail, in which water was kept for family
use, had been but recently painted inside; and that the paint used was
prepared in part, from the oxyde o