Yes, my dear Dolorosus, I commiserate you.  I regard your case, perhaps, with even sadder emotions than that excellent family-physician who has been sounding its depths these four years with a golden plummet, and has never yet touched bottom.  From those generous confidences which, in common with most of your personal acquaintances, I daily share, I am satisfied that no description can do justice to your physical disintegration, unless it be the wreck of matter and the crush of worlds with which Mr. Addison winds up Cato’s Soliloquy.  So far as I can ascertain, there is not an organ of your internal structure which is in its right place, at present, or which could perform any particular service, if it were there.  In the extensive library of medical almanacs and circulars which I find daily deposited by travelling agents at my front door, among all the agonizing vignettes of diseases which adorn their covers, and which Irish Bridget daily studies with inexperienced enjoyment in the front entry, there is no case which seems to afford a parallel to yours.  I found it stated in one of these works, the other day, that there is iron enough in the blood of twenty-four men to make a broadsword; but I am satisfied that it would be impossible to extract enough from the veins of yourself and your whole family to construct a crochet-needle for your eldest daughter.  And I am quite confident, that, if all the four hundred muscles of your present body were twisted together by a rope-maker, they would not furnish that patient young laborer with a needleful of thread.

You are undoubtedly, as you claim, a martyr to Dyspepsia; or if you prefer any other technical name for your disease or diseases, I will acquiesce in any, except, perhaps, the word “Neurology,” which I must regard as foreign to etymological science, if not to medical.  Your case, you think, is hard.  I should think it would be.  Yet I am impressed by it, I must admit, as was our adopted fellow-citizen by the contemplation of Niagara.  He, you remember, when pressed to admire the eternal plunge of the falling water, could only inquire, with serene acquiescence in natural laws, “And what’s to hinder?” I confess myself moved to similar reflections by your disease and its history.  My dear Dolorosus, can you acquaint me with any reason, in the heavens above or on the earth beneath, why you should not have dyspepsia?

My thoughts involuntarily wander back to that golden period, five years ago, when I spent one night and day beneath your hospitable roof.  I arrived, I remember, late in the evening.  The bed-room to which you kindly conducted me, after a light but wholesome supper of doughnuts and cheese, was pleasing in respect to furniture, but questionable in regard to physiology.  The house was not more than twenty years old, and the chamber must therefore have been aired within that distance of time, but not, I should have judged, more recently.  Perhaps its close, oppressive atmosphere could not have been analyzed