with a golden plummet, and
has never yet touched bottom. From those generous confidences which, in
common with most of your personal acquaintances, I daily share, I
am satisfied that no description can do justice to your physical
disintegration, unless it be the wreck of matter and the crush of worlds
with which Mr. Addison winds up Cato's Soliloquy. So far as I can
ascertain, there is not an organ of your internal structure which is
in its right place, at present, or which could perform any particular
service, if it were there. In the extensive library of medical almanacs
and circulars which I find daily deposited by travelling agents at my
front door, among all the agonizing vignettes of diseases which adorn
their covers, and which Irish Bridget daily studies with inexperienced
enjoyment in the front entry, there is no case which seems to afford a
parallel to yours. I found it stated in one of these works, the other
day, that there is iron enough in the blood of twenty-four men to make
a broadsword; but I am satisfied that it would be impossible to extract
enough from the veins of yourself and your whole family to construct a
crochet-needle for your eldest daughter. And I am quite confident,
that, if all the four hundred muscles of your present body were twisted
together by a rope-maker, they would not furnish that patient young
laborer with a needleful of thread.

You are undoubtedly, as you claim, a martyr to Dyspepsia; or if you
prefer any other technical name for your disease or diseases, I will
acquiesce in any, except, perhaps, the word "Neurology," which I must
regard as foreign to etymological science, if not to medical. Your case,
you think, is hard. I should think it would be. Yet I am impressed by
it, I must admit, as was our adopted fellow-citizen by the contemplation
of Niagara. He, you remember, when pressed to admire the eternal plunge
of the falling water, could only inquire, with serene acquiescence in
natural laws, "And what's to hinder?" I confess myself moved to similar
reflections by your disease and its history. My dear Dolorosus, can
you acquaint me with any reason, in the heavens above or on the earth
beneath, why you should _not_ have dyspepsia?

My thoughts involuntarily wander back to that golden period, five years
ago, when I spent one night and day beneath your hospitable roof. I
arrived, I remember, late in the evening. The bed-room to which you
kindly conducted me, after a light but wh