We confess we should like to have this story confirmed by some competent authority.  It appears to verge on the impossible:  unless, indeed, the fact was that the lady was some nervous, fanciful person, who took up a hypochondriac idea that she was paralysed, and got rid of the notion by having her constitution braced up.

We have already said a good deal of the enjoyable nature of the water system; we make a final quotation from our military friend:—­

I have given some account of my daily baths, and on reading over what I have written, I feel quite ashamed of the coldness of the recital of all my delight, the recollection of which makes my mouth water.  The reader will observe that I am a Scotchman (proverbially a matter-of-fact race), an old fellow, my enemy would say a slow coach.  I might enlarge on my ecstatic delight in my baths, my healthy glow, my light-heartedness, my feelings of elasticity, which made me fancy I could trip along the sward like a patent Vestris.  I might go much farther, I might indulge in poetic rapture—­most unbecoming my mature age—­and after all, fall far short of the reality.  The reader will do well to allow a large percentage of omitted ecstatic delineation in consequence of want of ardour on the part of the writer.  This is in fact due to justice.

See how old patients describe the Water Cure!  This is, at all events, a different strain from that of people who have been victimized by ordinary quacks and quack medicines, and who bestow their imprecations on the credulity which has at once ruined their constitutions and emptied their pockets.

We trust we have succeeded in persuading those who have glanced over these pages, that the Water Cure is by no means the violent thing which they have in all probability been accustomed to consider it.  There is no need for being nervous about going to it.  There is nothing about it that is half such a shock to the system as are blue pill and mercury, purgatives and drastics, leeches and the lancet.  Almost every appliance within its range is a source of positive enjoyment; the time spent under it is a cheerful holiday to body and mind.  We take it to be quackery and absurdity to maintain that all possible diseases can be cured by the cold water system; but, from our own experience, we believe that the system and its concomitants do tend powerfully to brace and re-invigorate, when mental exertion has told upon the system, and even threatened to break it down.  But really it is no new discovery that fresh air and water, simple food and abundant exercise, change of scene and intermission of toil and excitement, tend to brace the nerves and give fresh vigour to the limbs.  In the only respect in which we have any confidence in the Water Cure, it is truly no new system at all.  We did not need Priessnitz to tell us that the fair element which, in a hundred forms, makes so great a part of Creation’s beauty—­trembling, crystal-clear, upon the rosebud; gleaming in the sunset river; spreading, as we see it to-day, in the bright blue summer sea; fleecy-white in the silent clouds, and gay in the evening rainbow,—­is the true elixir of health and life, the most exhilarating draught, the most soothing anodyne; the secret of physical enjoyment, and mental buoyancy and vigour.