estigators are to be trusted, one unlucky female, at
least, must be still alive, for a novelist relates that she was done to
death by the internal taking of a dose of rattlesnake venom. I hope when
I am to be poisoned this mode may be employed. She might as well have
drunk a glass of milk. That book was a queer one to me after this
catastrophe: the woman ought to be dead and could not be.

The difficulty of the modern novelist in giving symptoms and preserving
the entire decorum of his pages has amused me a little. Depend upon it,
he had best fight shy of these chronic illnesses: they make queer
reading to a doctor who knows what sick people are; and above all does
this advice apply to death-beds. As a rule, folks get very horrible at
such times, and are a long while in dying, with few of their wits about
them at the last. But in novels people die marvellously possessed of
their faculties; or, if they are shot, always jump into the air exactly
as men never do in fact.

Just here, concerning wounds, a question occurs to me: The heroes who
have to lose a limb--a common thing in novels since the war--always come
back with one arm, and never with a lost leg. Is it more romantic to get
rid of one than of the other?--considering also that a one-armed embrace
of the weeping waiting lady-love must be so utterly unsatisfactory.

But enough of the patients. Among them I think I like Pendennis the
best, and consider little Dombey and Nell the most delightfully absurd.
And as to the doctors. Some of them have absolutely had the high
promotion to be the heroes of a whole book. Had not one, nay, two, a
novel to themselves? There is delightful Dr. Antonio, not enough of a
doctor to call down on him my professional wrath. As to Dr. Goodenough,
he has been in our family a long while,--on the shelf (God bless
him!),--and attended, we remember, our friend Colonel Newcome in that
death-bed matchless in art since Falstaff babbled life away. Yet, after
all, he is not a doctor so much as a man charmingly drawn.

There are in novels many good portraits of lawyers, from Pleydell to
Tulkinghorn. Whether fair or unjust as pictures, I am scarce able to
judge, although I believe that some of them have been recognized by our
legal brethren as sufficiently exact. While, however, we have plenty of
characters which for his purpose the novelist labels M.D., there seems
to have been some insuperable difficulty in evolving for artistic use a
doctor who