le-screw, and a good stout copper tea-kettle; till at last, in
the final words of preparation, his language assumes something of the
solemnity of a general addressing his army on the eve of a well-nigh
desperate enterprise: "Pluck up your spirits--trust in God, in me,
and yourselves; with this, was you put to it, you would encounter all
these difficulties ten times told. Write instantly, and tell me you
triumph over all fears--tell me Lydia is better, and a help-mate to
you. You say she grows like me: let her show me she does so in her
contempt of small dangers, and fighting against the apprehensions of
them, which is better still."

At last this anxiously awaited journey was taken; and, on Thursday,
July 7, Mrs. Sterne and her daughter arrived in Paris. Their stay
there was not long--not much extended, probably, beyond the proposed
week. For Sterne's health had, some ten days before the arrival of his
family, again given him warning to depart quickly. He had but a few
weeks recovered from the fever of which he spoke in his letter to
the Archbishop, when he again broke a blood-vessel in his lungs. It
happened in the night, and "finding in the morning that I was likely
to bleed to death, I sent immediately," he says, in a sentence which
quaintly brings out the paradox of contemporary medical treatment,
"for a surgeon to bleed me at both arms. This saved me"--_i.e._ did
not kill me--"and, with lying speechless three days, I recovered upon
my back in bed: the breach healed, and in a week after I got out."
But the weakness which ensued, and the subsequent "hurrying about," no
doubt as cicerone of Parisian sights to his wife and daughter, "made
me think it high time to haste to Toulouse." Accordingly, about the
20th of the month, and "in the midst of such heats that the oldest
Frenchman never remembers the like," the party set off by way of Lyons
and Montpellier for their Pyrenean destination. Their journey seems to
have been a journey of many mischances, extraordinary discomfort, and
incredible length; and it is not till the second week in August that
we again take up the broken thread of his correspondence. Writing to
Mr. Foley, his banker in Paris, on the 14th of that month, he speaks
of its having taken him three weeks to reach Toulouse; and adds that
"in our journey we suffered so much from the heats, it gives me pain
to remember it. I never saw a cloud from Paris to Nismes half as
broad as a twenty-four sols piece. Goo