; but she had not the gift of spelling accurately,
and wrote a most perplexing hand. This account I was to keep. It might
truly be called a bill of mortality; for my members all went from bad to
worse during the short time they continued in this system. I was a sort of
bookkeeper for the other world, to take places in the stage, and to see
that the first come were the first served. My pen was always in my hand,
for Dr. Sangrado had more practise than any physician of his time in
Valladolid. He had got into reputation with the public by a certain
professional slang, humored by a medical face, and some extraordinary
cures more honored by implicit faith than scrupulous investigation.

He was in no want of patients, nor consequently of property. He did not
keep the best house in the world; we lived with some little attention to
economy. The usual bill of fare consisted of peas, beans, boiled apples,
or cheese. He considered this food as best suited to the human stomach;
that is to say, as most amenable to the grinders, whence it was to
encounter the process of digestion. Nevertheless, easy as was their
passage, he was not for stopping the way with too much of them; and, to be
sure, he was in the right. But though he cautioned the maid and me against
repletion in respect of solids, it was made up by free permission to drink
as much water as we liked. Far from prescribing us any limits in that
direction, he would tell us sometimes:

"Drink, my children; health consists in the pliability and moisture of the
parts. Drink water by pailfuls; it is a universal dissolvent; water
liquefies all the salts. Is the course of the blood a little sluggish?
This grand principle sets it forward. Too rapid? Its career is checked."

Our doctor was so orthodox on this head that, though advanced in years, he
drank nothing himself but water. He defined old age to be a natural
consumption which dries us up and wastes us away; on this principle he
deplored the ignorance of those who call wine "old men's milk." He
maintained that wine wears them out and corrodes them; and pleaded with
all the force of his eloquence against that liquor, fatal in common both
to the young and old--that friend with a serpent in its bosom--that
pleasure with a dagger under its girdle.

In spite of these fine arguments, at the end of a week I felt an ailment
which I was blasphemous enough to saddle on the universal dissolvent and
the new-fangled diet. I stated my sympto