ed, may be worth from three to five years of
the fourscore which you hope to attain.

If, on the other hand, instead of going about cheerily in society,
making the best of everything and as far as possible forgetting your
troubles, you can make up your mind to economize all your stores of
vital energy, to hoard your life as a miser hoards his money, you will
stand a fair chance of living until you are tired of life,--fortunate if
everybody is not tired of you.

One of my prescriptions for longevity may startle you somewhat. It is
this: Become the subject of a mortal disease. Let half a dozen doctors
thump you, and knead you, and test you in every possible way, and render
their verdict that you have an internal complaint; they don't know
exactly what it is, but it will certainly kill you by and by. Then bid
farewell to the world and shut yourself up for an invalid. If you are
threescore years old when you begin this mode of life, you may very
probably last twenty years, and there you are,--an octogenarian. In
the mean time, your friends outside have been dropping off, one after
another, until you find yourself almost alone, nursing your mortal
complaint as if it were your baby, hugging it and kept alive by it,--if
to exist is to live. Who has not seen cases like this,--a man or a woman
shutting himself or herself up, visited by a doctor or a succession
of doctors (I remember that once, in my earlier experience, I was
the twenty-seventh physician who had been consulted), always taking
medicine, until everybody was reminded of that impatient speech of
a relative of one of these invalid vampires who live on the blood of
tired-out attendants, "I do wish she would get well--or something"?
Persons who are shut up in that way, confined to their chambers,
sometimes to their beds, have a very small amount of vital expenditure,
and wear out very little of their living substance. They are like lamps
with half their wicks picked down, and will continue to burn when other
lamps have used up all their oil. An insurance office might make money
by taking no risks except on lives of persons suffering from mortal
disease. It is on this principle of economizing the powers of life
that a very eminent American physician,--Dr. Weir Mitchell, a man
of genius,--has founded his treatment of certain cases of nervous
exhaustion.

What have I got to say about temperance, the use of animal food, and so
forth? These are questions asked me. Nature