ut of gustatory enjoyment.

The mince pie dyspeptic is just the man for quackery to feed upon. He
will keep his nerves in such a state as to render him liable to read
about and swallow all the wonderful cures of the day--whether hunger
cures, nutrition cures, clairvoyant cures, "spiritual" cures, or any
other cures. Now it is great gain, when we have got beyond all these,
when we simply put into our stomachs what is right, and think no more
about it, leaving ourselves to the event; and this in sickness and
health both.

A man in the eastern part of Massachusetts,--an asthmatic,--told me he
had spent six hundred dollars in fourteen years, on quack medicines, and
that he was nothing bettered by them. That man, you may depend, is the
slave of his feelings. No man who has been accustomed to dictate to his
stomach what it shall have, and make it submit, would ever do this. A
very poor woman, on the Green Mountains, assured me she had spent, or
rather wasted, four hundred dollars in the same way. We must drop all
this. I do not now say we must drop or lay aside all medicine, in all
cases; that is quite another question. But I do say, we must rely on
obedience to the laws of God, or on doing right, not on medicine. It
will be time enough to rely on medicine when our family physician urges
it upon us as indispensable.

If I have a single regret with regard to the instruction I have given
my patients, from time to time, it is that I have not pressed upon them
more forcibly and perseveringly, such views as are comprised in the
foregoing reasonings and reflections. They are all-important to the
dyspeptic, and by no means less important to the healthy than to the
diseased.

CHAPTER XCII.

GIANTS IN THE EARTH.

It is said of Job, and his friends who visited him to condole with him
in his sufferings, that they sat down together and said nothing, for
seven days and seven nights.

Nearly twenty years ago, a man of gigantic frame, but haggard
appearance, came to me, and after the usual compliments,--which were
indeed very dry ones,--sat down by my side, and said nothing; and this
for the very same reason which is assigned as the cause of the long
silence of Job and his friends--his grief and his sufferings were very
great.

His disease, however, was very different in its nature from that of Job.
It was more like insanity than small pox, or eruptive disease of any
kind. But hear him tell his own story, which I solicite