time, with such rests and full free breathings as nature required; after
which, I slept, perspired profusely, and was well in the morning.

This was an occurrence which sunk deep into my mind; and the more so, as
I could not speak much of it, for the truth was too improbable to be
believed. But the successful issue of this, my first experiment upon the
dreaded disease, prepared me to act with boldness and efficiency in a
case which occurred in my own house about a week after.

On the 14th of August, 1849, Jane Phayre, an Irish woman in my service,
of about twenty-five years of age, having been ill for four days with
diarrhoea, was suddenly struck with what the French call cholera
_foudroyant_--from fright. Alarmed by unwonted sounds near her window in
a basement room, she mounted the window-seat to look out at the top
sash, and found her face close to that of a man dying of cholera, who in
his death-cramps was brought from a steamboat on a litter, and thus
rested upon the pavement. The cover was lifted from his face, and the
sight and the smell struck her with faintness and trembling; and with
difficulty she reached her bed. I was called to go to her quickly by
Eliza Fagan, who said that Jane was very bad. She had a clay-cold
death-look, and a frightful blackness around her eyes. Her face, as I
saw it, was livid, pinched in features, and corpse-like, and her pulse
but a feeble flutter; and she seemed only to breathe from the top of her
lungs. She tried, as she afterwards told me, to say, "I am dying," but
her speech was husky and inarticulate. She says her sight and hearing
were gone; and while Eliza and I were dragging her out of doors, she
could not see the window, and did not feel her feet. We placed her in an
upright position, with her back resting against a board-wall, a fresh
breeze blowing full in her face. Her senses were now partially restored.
I told her to breathe violently, for she must get the bad air out of her
lungs and the good air in; and I showed her how she must do it. At first
she said, "I can't, for something rises up in the inside." When I told
her, sternly, that her life depended on it, and she must, she tried to
obey me. At first, it gave her severe headache, but as soon as deep
breathing was fairly begun, while I was watching her face with intense
anxiety, the color changed from the clay-cold death-look to the full
flush of the warm hue of life, and she joyfully exclaimed, "Oh! I feel
well!"