In the happy rush towards useful health, of a convalescence undisturbed by drawbacks, it is pleasant to think, as one lies mending, of the good day to come when my friend, recovering from typhoid or smallpox, shall send for his legal adviser and desire him as usual to bring suit against the city for damages and loss of time.

A little girl coughed in my face a hideous breath of membraneous decay.  I felt at once a conviction of having been hit.  Two days later I was down with her malady.  She herself and two more of her family owed their disease to the overflow of a neighbor’s cesspool, and to them—­poor, careless folk—­Death dealt out a yet sterner retribution.  There was a semi-civilized community beyond both.  Should one go to law about it and test the matter of ultimate responsibility?

The amiability of convalescence is against it.  One feels at peace with all the world, and so lies still, and reflects, “like souls that balance joy and pain,” as to whether, on the whole, the matter has not had its valuable side.  Certainly it has brought experiences not otherwise attainable.

Of the deeper and more serious insights a man gathers in the close approach of death and the swift, delicious return to safety and enlarging powers I hardly care to speak.  To a physician, it is simply invaluable to have known in his own person pain, and to have been at close quarters with his constant enemy, and come off only wounded from the contest.  In the anxiety about you is read anew what you look upon in other households every day, and perhaps with a too accustomed eye.  And as to pain, I am almost ready to say that the physician who has not felt it is imperfectly educated.  It were easy to dwell on this aspect of convalescence, but the mental state of one on the way to health is not favorable to connected thought.  It is more grateful to lie in the sun, at the window, and watch the snow-birds on the ice-clad maples across the way, and now and then, day after day, to jot down the thoughts that hop about one’s brain like the friendly birds on the mail-clad twigs.

I make no apology for the disconnectedness of my reflections, but turn gladly to my records of the joyous and less grave observations which the passing hours brought me.  Much as I have seen of disease and recoveries in all manner of men and women, the chance to observe them in my own person presented me with many little novel facts of interest.  I find in my brief notes of this well-remembered time many records of the extraordinary acuteness won for a while by the senses.

Not dubious, but, alas! brief, is the gain which the sensorium acquires in this delightfully instructive passage out of death’s shadow into certain sunshine.  In my own case there was a rapid exfoliation, as we call it, of the skin, a loss and renewal of the outer layer of the cuticle.  As a result of this, the sense of touch became for a while more acute, and was at times unpleasantly delicate.  This seemed