It may be replied that much of the benefit--some would go farther, and say all--to be expected from the watering-places is derivable from change of scene and habit of living, new faces, new interests, new objects of curiosity, aided by agreeable intercourse, and what the medical folk call ‘pleasant and cheerful society.’ This, be it known, is no chance collocation of words set down at random; it is a _bona fide_ technical--as much so as the hardest Greek compound that ever floored an apothecary. ‘Pleasant and cheerful society!’ they speak of it as they would of the latest improvement in chemistry or the last patent medicine--a thing to be had for asking for, like opodeldoc or Morison’s pills. A line of treatment is prescribed for you, winding up in this one principle; and your physician, as he shakes your hand and says ‘good- bye,’ seems like an angel of benevolence, who, instead of consigning you to the horrors of the pharmacopoeia and a sick-bed, tells you to pack off to the Rhine, spend your summer at Ems or Wiesbaden, and, above all things, keep early hours, and ‘pleasant, cheerful society.’ Oh, why has no martyr to the miseries of a ‘liver’ or the sorrows of ‘nerves’ ever asked his M.D. where--where is this delightful intercourse to be found? or by what universal principle of application can the same tone of society please the mirthful and the melancholy, the man of depressed, desponding habit, and the man of sanguine, hopeful temperament? How can the indolent and lethargic soul be made to derive pleasure from the hustling energies of more excited natures, or the fidgety victim of instability sympathise with the delights of quiet and tranquillity? He who enjoys ‘rude health’--the phrase must have been invented by a fashionable physician; none other could have deemed such a possession an offensive quality--may very well amuse himself by the oddities and eccentricities of his fellow-men, so ludicrously exhibited _en scene_ before him. But in what way will these things appear to the individual with an ailing body and a distempered brain? It is impossible that contrarieties of temperament would ever draw men into close intimacy during illness. The very nature of a sick man’s temper is to undervalue all sufferings save his own and those resembling his. The victim of obesity has no sympathies with the martyr to atrophy; he may envy, he cannot pity him. The man who cannot eat surely has little compassion for the woes of him who has the ‘wolf,’ and must be muzzled at meal times. The result, then, is obvious. The gloomy men get together in groups, and croak in concert; each mind brings its share of affliction to the common fund, and they form a joint-stock company of misery that rapidly assists their progress to the grave; while the nervously excited ones herd together by dozens, suggesting daily new extravagances and caprices for the adoption of one another, till there is not an air-drawn dagger of the mind unfamiliar to one among them; and