reassurance. But when you begin to feel as if you were a creature reborn, when you are safe and keenly enjoying the return of health, then it is that the morning visit is so delightful. You look for his coming and count on the daily chat. Should he chance to be what many of my medical brothers are,—educated, accomplished, with wide artistic and mental sympathies,—he brings a strong, breezy freshness of the outer world with him into the monastic life of the sick-room. One does not escape from being a patient because of being also a physician, and for my part I am glad to confess my sense of enjoyment in such visits, and how I have longed to keep my doctor at my side and to decoy him into a protracted stay. The convalescence he observes is for him, too, a pleasant thing. He has and should have pride in some distinct rescue, or in the fact that he has been able to stand by, with little interference, and see the disease run its normal course. I once watched a famous surgeon just after he had done a life-saving operation by dim candle-light. He stood smiling as the child's breath came back, and kept nodding his head with pleasant sense of his own competence. He was most like a Newfoundland dog I once had the luck to see pull out a small child from the water and on to a raft. When we came up, the dog was wagging his tail and standing beside the child with sense of self-approval in every hair. The man wagged his head; the dog wagged his tail. Each liked well what he had done.

Thus it is that these half-hours by the convalescent's couch are full of subtle flattery for the doctor, and are apt to evolve the social best of him, as he notes the daily gain in strength and color, and listens, a tranquil despot, to one's pleas for this freedom or that indulgence. He turns over your books, suggests others, and, trained by a thousand such interviews, is likely enough a man interesting on many sides.

You selfishly enjoy his visit, not suspecting that you, too, are ignorantly helpful. He has been in sadder homes to-day, has been sorely tried, has had to tell grim truths, is tired, mind and body. The visit he makes you is for him a pleasant oasis: not all convalescents are agreeable. He goes away refreshed.

Most doctors have their share, and more, of illness, and are not, as I have seen stated, exempt from falling a prey to contagious maladies. Indeed, our records sadly show that this is not the case. Perhaps there is value for them and their future patients in the fact that they have been in turn patient and doctor and have served in both camps. Like other sick folks, the physician, as I know, looks forward, when ill, to the "morning visits" quite as anxiously as do any of those who have at times awaited his own coming.

That medical poet who has the joyous art of sending a ripple of mirth across the faces of the Anglo-Saxon world recognizes this fact in a cheerful poem, called "The Morning Visit," and to which I gladly refer any of my readers who would like to know from the lips of Oliver Wendell Holmes what manner of delightful patient he must have been. I can fancy that he lost for his doctor many a pleasant hour.

It has seemed to me as if this wonderful remaking and regrowing of the tissues might be likened to a swift change from the weak childhood of disease to a sudden manhood of mind and body, in which is something of mysterious development elsewhere unmatched in life. Death has been minutely busy with your tissues, and millions of dead molecules are being restored in such better condition that not only are you become new in the best sense,—renewed, as we say,—but have gotten power to grow again, and, after your terrible typhoid or yellow fever, may win a half-inch or so in the next six months,—a doubtful advantage for some of us, but a curious and sure sign of great integral change.

The Greeks had a notion that once in seven years we are totally changed, the man of seven years back having in this time undergone an entire reconstruction. We know now that life is a constant death and a renewing,—that our every-day nutrition involves millions of molecular deaths and as many millions of births,—although to liken that which is so exquisitely managed, so undisturbingly done, to the coarser phenomena of death and birth is in a measure misleading.

Diseases such as typhoid fever, or a sharp local lung-trouble like pneumonia, really do make these minute changes approximate in abruptness to death. You weigh, let us say, one hundred and eighty pounds, and you drop in three weeks of a fever to one hundred and thirty pounds. The rest of you is dead. You have lost, as men say, fifty pounds, but your debt to disease, or to the blunders of civilization, for it is a case of creditor behind creditor, is paid. Your capital is much diminished, but you have come out of the trial with an amazing renovation of energy. This is the happy convalescence of the wholesome man. The other, the unlucky, fellow, does not get as safely through the cleansing bankruptcy of disease. The vicious, unlucky, or gouty grandfather appears on the books of that court in mysterious ways; his sins are pathologically visited on his child's child in this time of testing strain.

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