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 to me, as I first thought of its cause, a mere mechanical result, but I incline to suspect now that it was in a measure due to a true increase in capacity to feel, because I found also that the sister sense of pain was heightened. Slight things hurt me, and a rather gentle pinch gave undue discomfort. No doubt a part of this was owing to my having taken a good deal of opium, and then abruptly laid it aside. As I have elsewhere stated, this is apt to leave the nerves oversensitive for a season. The sense of hearing seemed to me to be less wide awake. I did not hear better, but high notes were for a while most unpleasant. The sense of taste grew singularly appreciative for a time, and made every meal a joyful occasion. The simplest food had distinct flavors. As for a glass of old Madeira,—a demijohned veteran of many ripening summers,—I recall to this day with astonishment the wonderful thing it was, and how it went over the tongue in a sort of procession of tastes, and what changeful bouquets it left in my mouth,—a strange variety of varying impressions, like the play of colors. In these days of more unspiritual health and coarser sense I am almost ashamed to say what pleasure I found in a dish of terrapin.

The function of smell became for me a source both of annoyance and, later on, of pleasure. I smelt things no one else could, and more things than I now can. The spring came early, and once out of doors the swiftly-flitting hours of sensory acuteness brought to me on every breeze nameless odors which have no being to the common sense,—a sweet, faint confusion of scents, some slight, some too intense,—a gamut of odors. Usually I have an imperfect capacity to apprehend smells, unless they are very positive, and it was a curious lesson to learn how intense for the time a not perfect function may become. Recent researches have shown that a drug like mercaptan may be used to test the limit of olfactory appreciation. We have thus come to know that the capacity to perceive an odor is more delicate than our ability to recognize light. Probably it is an inconceivable delicacy of the sense of smell more than anything else which enables animals to find their way in the manner which seems to us so utterly mysterious. Yet, even in human beings, and not alone in a fortunate convalescence, do we see startling illustrations of the possibilities of this form of sensorial acuteness. I know of a woman who can by the smell at once tell the worn gloves of the several people with whom she is most familiar, and I also recall a clever choreic lad of fourteen who could distinguish when blindfold the handkerchiefs of his mother, his father, or himself, just after they have been washed and ironed. This test has been made over and over, to my satisfaction and surprise.

If a man could possess in the highest degree and in combination all of the possible extremes of sensory appreciativeness seen in disease, in hysteria, and in the hypnotic state, we should have a being of extraordinary capacities for observation. Taylor, in his "Physical Theory of Another World," a singular and half-forgotten book, has set this forth as conceivable of the beings of a world to come, and dwelt upon it in an ingenious and interesting way. For a long time even the inhalation of tobacco-smoke from a friend's cigar disturbed my heart, but one day, and it was, I fear, long before my physician, and he was wise, thought it prudent, I suddenly fell a prey to our lady Nicotia. I had been reading listlessly a cruel essay in the Atlantic on the wickedness of smoking, and was presently seized with a desire to look at King James's famous "counterblast" against the weed. One is like a spoiled child at these times, and I sent off at once for the royal fulmination, which I found dull enough. It led to results the monarch could not have dreamed of. I got a full-flavored cigar, and had a half-hour of worshipful incense-product at the shrine of the brown-cheeked lady,—a thing to remember,—and which I had leisure enough to repent of in the sleepless night it cost me.