inflammation at the age when feeling is no
longer fancy, throws out a heart-disease which sometimes kills without
warning, or sometimes, if the grief be removed, will rather prolong than
shorten life, by inducing a prudent avoidance of worry in future. There
is that worthy old gentleman who was taken so ill at Fawley, and about
whom you were so anxious: in his case there had certainly been chronic
grief; then came acute worry, and the heart could not get through its
duties. Fifty years ago doctors would have cried 'apoplexy!'--nowadays
we know that the heart saves the head. Well, he was more easy in his
mind the last time I saw him, and thanks to his temperance, and his
constitutional dislike to self-indulgence in worry, he may jog on to
eighty, in spite of the stethoscope! Excess in the moral emotions gives
heart-disease; abuse of the physical powers, paralysis; both more common
than they were--the first for your gentle sex, the second for our rough
one. Both, too, lie in wait for their victims at the entrance in middle
life. I have a very fine case of paralysis now; a man built up by nature
to live to a hundred--never saw such a splendid formation--such bone and
such muscle. I would have given Van Amburgh the two best of his lions,
and my man would have done for all three in five minutes. All the worse
for him, my dear lady--all the worse for him. His strength leads him on
to abuse the main fountains of life, and out jumps avenging Paralysis
and fells him to earth with a blow. 'Tis your Hercules that Paralysis
loves; she despises the weak invalid, who prudently shims all excess.
And so, my dear lady, that assassin called Aneurism lies in wait for the
hearts that abuse their own force of emotion; sparing hearts that, less
vital, are thrifty in waste and supply. But you are not listening to
one! And yet my patient may not be quite unknown to your ladyship; for
in happening to mention the other day, to the lady who attends to and
nurses him, that I could not call this morning, as I had a visit to pay
to Lady Montfort at Twickenham, she became very anxious about you, and
wrote this note, which she begged me to give you. She seems very much
attached to my patient--not his wife nor his sister. She interests
me;--capital nurse-cleverish woman too. Oh! here is the note."

Caroline, who had given but little heed to this recital, listlessly
received the note--scarcely looked at the address--and was about to put
it aside, when th