freshing character which follows disease. I tossed
upon my couch in troubled dreams, amid which I fancied myself a knight
of the olden time, fighting in the lists for a wreath or glove from a
tourney queen. In the contest I was conscious of being overthrown, and
raised myself up from the inglorious earth upon which I had been
rolled, a bruised knight from head to heel. When I awoke in the
morning the soreness of every joint made me half think, for a moment,
that I had suffered some injury while in sleeping unconsciousness;
but, waking recollection assigned a natural cause, and I bowed my
fevered head to the punishment of my imprudence. An old and dignified
physician was summoned to my bed-side, who felt my pulse, ordered
confinement to my room, and the swallowing of a horrible looking
potion, which nearly filled a common-sized tumbler. A few days care,
he said, would restore me, and with his own hands he mixed my dose,
placed it beside me upon a table, and departed. I venerate a kind and
skillful physician; but, like all the rest of the human family, his
nauseous doses I abhor. I looked at the one before me until, in
imagination, I tasted its ingredients. In my fevered vision the vessel
grew into a monster goblet, and soon after it assumed the shape of a
huge glass tun. Methought I commenced swallowing, fearful that if I
longer hesitated it would grow more vast, and then it seemed as if the
dose would never be exhausted, and that my body would not contain the
whole of the dreadful compound. I dropped off again from this
half-dreamy state into the oblivion of deep sleep, and remained
unconscious of every thing until awoke in the evening by the chiming
of bells beneath my window. I had scarcely changed my position before
Victor, wrapped in his fur-lined coat, walked into my room.

"Why, my dear fellow," cried he, on seeing me nestled beneath the
cover, with a towel round my head by way of a night-cap, "what is all
this? Nothing serious, I hope?"

"Oh no," answered I, "only sore bones, and an embargo on the
respiratory organs. That mixture"--calling his attention to the
tumbler--"will no doubt set all right again."

"_Pah!_" he exclaimed, twisting his face as if he had tasted it, "I
hope you don't resort to such restoratives."

"So goes the doctor's orders," said I.

"Oh, a pest on his drugs," says Victor. "Why didn't you call me in?
I'm worth a dozen _regular_ practitioners in such cases, especially
where I am the p