lf and two more of her family owed their
disease to the overflow of a neighbor's cesspool, and to them--poor,
careless folk--Death dealt out a yet sterner retribution. There was a
semi-civilized community beyond both. Should one go to law about it and
test the matter of ultimate responsibility?

The amiability of convalescence is against it. One feels at peace with
all the world, and so lies still, and reflects, "like souls that balance
joy and pain," as to whether, on the whole, the matter has not had its
valuable side. Certainly it has brought experiences not otherwise
attainable.

Of the deeper and more serious insights a man gathers in the close
approach of death and the swift, delicious return to safety and
enlarging powers I hardly care to speak. To a physician, it is simply
invaluable to have known in his own person pain, and to have been at
close quarters with his constant enemy, and come off only wounded from
the contest. In the anxiety about you is read anew what you look upon in
other households every day, and perhaps with a too accustomed eye. And
as to pain, I am almost ready to say that the physician who has not felt
it is imperfectly educated. It were easy to dwell on this aspect of
convalescence, but the mental state of one on the way to health is not
favorable to connected thought. It is more grateful to lie in the sun,
at the window, and watch the snow-birds on the ice-clad maples across
the way, and now and then, day after day, to jot down the thoughts that
hop about one's brain like the friendly birds on the mail-clad twigs.

I make no apology for the disconnectedness of my reflections, but turn
gladly to my records of the joyous and less grave observations which the
passing hours brought me. Much as I have seen of disease and recoveries
in all manner of men and women, the chance to observe them in my own
person presented me with many little novel facts of interest. I find in
my brief notes of this well-remembered time many records of the
extraordinary acuteness won for a while by the senses.

Not dubious, but, alas! brief, is the gain which the sensorium acquires
in this delightfully instructive passage out of death's shadow into
certain sunshine. In my own case there was a rapid exfoliation, as we
call it, of the skin, a loss and renewal of the outer layer of the
cuticle. As a result of this, the sense of touch became for a while more
acute, and was at times unpleasantly delicate. This seemed to