You are learning, through all this, the sagest maxims of resignation, and trying to apply them.  “Life is hard, but short,” you say; “Providence is inscrutable; we must submit to its mysterious decrees.”  Would it not be better, my dear Dolorosus, to say instead, “Life is noble and immortal; God is good; we must obey his plain laws, or accept the beneficent penalties”?  The rise and fall of health are no more accidental than the rise and fall of indigo; and it is the duty of those concerned in either commodity to keep their eyes open, and learn the business intelligently.  Of the three proverbial desiderata, it is as easy to be healthy as to be wealthy, and much easier than to be wise, except so far as health and wisdom mean the same thing.  After health, indeed, the other necessaries of life are very simple, and easily obtained;—­with moderate desires, regular employment, a loving home, correct theology, the right politics, and a year’s subscription to the “Atlantic Monthly,” I have no doubt that life, in this planet, may be as happy as in any other of the solar system, not excepting Neptune and the fifty-five asteroids.

You are possibly aware, my dear Dolorosus,—­for I remember that you were destined by your parents for the physician of your native seaside village, until you found a more congenial avocation in curing mackerel,—­that the ancient medals represented the goddess Hygeia with a serpent three times as large as that carried by Aesculapius, to denote the superiority of hygiene to medicine, prevention to cure.  To seek health as you are now seeking it, regarding every new physician as if he were Pandora, and carried hope at the bottom of his medicine-chest, is really rather unpromising.  This perpetual self-inspection of yours, registering your pulse thrice a day, as if it were a thermometer and you an observer for the Smithsonian,—­these long consultations with the other patients in the dreary parlor of the infirmary, the morning devoted to debates on the nervous system, the afternoon to meditations on the stomach, and the evening to soliloquies on the spine,—­will do you no good.  The more you know, under these circumstances, the worse it will be for you.  You will become like Boerhaave’s hypochondriacal student, who, after every lecture, believed himself to be the victim of the particular disease just expounded.  We may even think too much about health,—­and certainly too much about illness.  I solemnly believe that the very best thing that could be done for you at this moment, you unfortunate individual, would be to buy you a saddle-horse and a revolver, and start you tomorrow for the Rocky Mountains, with distinct instructions to treat any man as a Border Ruffian who should venture to allude to the subject of disease in your presence.