I did not forget--I did not then forget--the oft inculcated and frequently received doctrine, that animal impurity is not apt to engender disease. It most certainly had an agency--a prominent one--in the case before us. Perhaps it has such an influence much more frequently than is generally supposed. One of my patients, in the family which I first mentioned,--a little boy two or three years old,--died almost as soon, after being seized with disease, as his elder brother had done. The rest, though severely sick, and at times given over to die, finally recovered. Some of them were sick, however, many months, and none of them, so far as I now recollect,--with perhaps a single exception,--ever enjoyed as good health afterward as before. I had in these families six or eight of the most trying cases I ever had in my life; and yet, with the exceptions before named, all recovered. How much agency my own labors as a medical man had in producing this result, I am at a loss to conjecture. As an attendant or nurse, I have no doubt my services were valuable. And it was because a good nurse is worth more than a physician that I so frequently ran the risk of watching over the sick so closely as considerably to impair my own health. The neighbors and friends of the two sick families, as I have already intimated, looked on in silent agony during the whole campaign; expecting, first that _their_ families, too, would soon be called to take their turn; and secondly, that I, the commander in chief, should be a sufferer, which of course would be a great public disadvantage. They were almost as much gratified as I, when we all came forth from the fire unscathed. On the whole, except as regards health, I was a gainer rather than a loser by the affair. I mean, of course, in the way of medical reputation. I was by this time fairly established as a powder and pill distributer, of the _first water_. In other words, I was beginning to be regarded as a good family physician, and to be sought for, not only within the narrow limits of my own native township, some four or five miles square, but also quite beyond these narrow precincts. Occasionally I had patients in three or four adjoining towns, and I was even occasionally called as counsel to other physicians. My ambition was high, perhaps higher than it ought to have been; but it had its checks and even its valleys of humiliation; so that on the whole I retained my sanity and a full measure of public confidence.