And knowing how it fared with his
friends--perfect health one day, a catarrh the next, blinds drawn down,
silence in the house, blubbered faces of widow and orphans, intimation
of the event in the newspapers, with a request that friends will accept
of it, the day after--a man, as he draws near middle age, begins to
suspect every transient indisposition; to be careful of being caught in
a shower, to shudder at sitting in wet shoes; he feels his pulse, he
anxiously peruses his face in a mirror, he becomes critical as to the
colour of his tongue. In early life illness is a luxury, and draws out
toward the sufferer curious and delicious tendernesses, which are felt
to be a full over-payment of pain and weakness; then there is the
pleasant period of convalescence, when one tastes a core and marrow of
delight in meats, drinks, sleep, silence; the bunch of newly-plucked
flowers on the table, the sedulous attentions and patient forbearance
of nurses and friends. Later in life, when one occupies a post, and is
in discharge of duties which are accumulating against recovery, illness
and convalescence cease to be luxuries. Illness is felt to be a cruel
interruption of the ordinary course of things, and the sick person is
harassed by a sense of the loss of time and the loss of strength. He
is placed _hors de combat_; all the while he is conscious that the
battle is going on around him, and he feels his temporary withdrawal a
misfortune. Of course, unless a man is very unhappily circumstanced,
he has in his later illnesses all the love, patience, and attention
which sweetened his earlier ones; but then he cannot rest in them, and
accept them as before as compensation in full. The world is ever with
him; through his interests and his affections he has meshed himself in
an intricate net-work of relationships and other dependences, and a
fatal issue--which in such cases is ever on the cards--would destroy
all these, and bring about more serious matters than the shedding of
tears. In a man's earlier illnesses, too, he had not only no such
definite future to work out, he had a stronger spring of life and hope;
he was rich in time, and could wait; and lying in his chamber now, he
cannot help remembering that, as Mr. Thackeray expresses it, there
comes at last an illness to which there may be no convalescence. What
if that illness be already come? And so there is nothing left for him,
but to bear the rod with patience, and to exercis