On the road to his paternal home, influenced in no small degree by mental excitement, his delirium returned, and with an intensity that never afterwards abated. He was, for about three weeks, a most inveterate and raving maniac, when, worn out prematurely with disease, he sunk to rise no more till the general resurrection. There was no post-mortem examination of this young man, though there should have been. Not that there was any lurking suspicion of peculiarity of disease, but because such examinations may always be made serviceable to the cause of medical science, while they cannot possibly injure either the dead or the living. I have been the more minute in my account of this man, because the case is an instructive one, both to the professional and non-professional reader, and also because it places medicine and physicians in the true light, and holds forth to the world the wonderfully recuperative power of nature, and the vast importance of giving heed to the laws of health and to the voice of physiology. CHAPTER LXIV. GETTING INTO A CIRCLE. The oddity of some of my captions may seem to require an apology; but I beg the doubtful reader to suspend any unfavorable decisions, till he has read the chapter which follows. He will not, either in the present instance or in any other, be introduced to a magic ring, or to the mysteries of modern "spiritualism." The circle into which my patient fell, was of a different description. A young mother from the west, about the year 1840, came to consult me with regard to her health. Not being able to receive her into my own family, I made arrangements for her reception in the immediate neighborhood, where she remained for a long time. She was a dyspeptic--if not of giant magnitude, but little short of it. I spent many an hour in endeavoring to set all right, both in mind and body. It was, however, much easier to set her head right, than her hands, feet, and stomach. She had been under the care of almost all sorts of medical men--hydropathic, homoeopathic, and allopathic. Some of them, from all these schools, had been men of good sense, while a much larger proportion of them had turned out to be fools, and had done her more harm than good. In short, like the woman in the New Testament, she had spent much on many physicians, and was nothing bettered by it, but rather made worse. Under such circumstances what ground was there for hope? What she most needed, it was easy to see, was a little more of resolution to carry out and complete what she believed to be her duty. I told her so. I told her how many times I had repeated to her the same directions; while she, after the lapse of a very few days,--sometimes only a day or two,--had come round again, in her remarks and inquiries, to the very point whence she had first started. I told her how easy a thing this getting into a circle was, and how difficult it was to escape from it.