But I cannot venture to hope that you will do anything so reasonable.  The fascinations of your present life are too overwhelming; when an invalid once begins to enjoy the contemplation of his own woes, as you appear to do, it is all over with him.  Besides, you urge, and perhaps justly, that your case has already gone too far, for so rough a tonic.  What, then, can I do for you?  Medicine I cannot offer; for even your respectable family-physician occasionally hints that you need something different from that.  I suspect that all rational advice for you may be summed up in one prescription:  Reverse instantly all the habits of your previous physical existence, and there may be some chance for you.  But, perhaps, I had better enter more into detail.

Do not think that I am going to recur to the painful themes of doughnuts and diet.  I fear my hints, already given, on those subjects, may wound the sensitive nature of Mrs. D., who suffers now such utter martyrdom from your condition that I cannot bring myself to heap further coals of fire on her head, even though the coals be taken from her own very ineffectual cooking-stove.  Let me dwell rather on points where you have exclusive jurisdiction, and can live wisely or foolishly, at your pleasure.

It does not depend on you, perhaps, whether you shall eat bread or saleratus, meat or sole-leather; but it certainly does depend upon yourself whether you shall wash yourself daily.  I do not wish to be personal, but I verily believe, O companion of my childhood! that, until you began to dabble in Hydropathy, you had not bestowed a sincere ablution upon your entire person since the epoch when, twenty years ago, we took our last plunge together, off Titcomb’s wharf, in our native village.  That in your well-furnished house there are no hydraulic privileges beyond pint water-pitchers, I know from anxious personal inspection.  I know that you have spent an occasional week at the sea-shore during the summer, and that many people prefer to do up their cleanliness for the year during these excursions; indeed, you yourself have mentioned to me, at such times, with some enthusiasm, your daily sea-bath.  But I have been privately assured, by the other boarders, that the bath in question always consisted of putting on a neat bathing-dress and sitting awhile on a rock among the sea-weed, like an insane merman, with the highest waves submerging only your knees, while the younger Dolorosi splashed and gambolled in safe shallows behind you.  Even that is better than nothing, but—­Soul of Mohammed!—­is that called bathing?  Verily, we are, as the Turks declare, a nation of “dirty Franks,” if this be the accepted definition.