The month of May, with its promise of relief from the still lingering winter, had now begun. Fielding therefore resolved, he says, to visit a little country house of his "which stands at Ealing, in the county of Middlesex, in the best air, I believe, in the whole kingdom." [6] Towards the end of the month, he had resort to a long forgotten eighteenth century panacea, the tar-water discovered by Bishop Berkeley; and very soon experienced effects far beyond his "most sanguine hopes." Success beyond Fielding's most sanguine hopes must have been great indeed; and accordingly we hear how this tar-water, from the very first, lessened his illness, increased his appetite, and very slowly added to his bodily strength. By the end of the month a third application by his surgeon revealed distinctly favourable symptoms; but still both the dropsy and the asthma were becoming more serious; and the summer, which the doctors seemed to think the sick man's 'only chance of life' seemed scarce likely to visit England at all in that sunless year. "In the whole month of May the sun scarce appeared three times" we learn, from the _Voyage_. Fearing therefore the renewed assaults of winter, before he had recruited his forces so as "to be in anywise able to withstand them," Fielding resolved, with the approval of a very eminent physician, to put an already formed project into immediate execution. This was to seek further recovery in some warmer climate. At first Aix was thought of, but here the difficulties of travel in the reign of George II. for invalids of slender means, proved insuperable. The journey by land, "beside the expense of it," Fielding found to be "infinitely too long and fatiguing"; and no ship was announced as sailing within 'any reasonable time' for that part of the Mediterranean. Lisbon accordingly was decided upon; and John Fielding soon discovered a ship with excellent passenger accommodation, and which was due to sail in three days. "I eagerly embraced the offer," writes Fielding, as though he were starting on a pleasure cruise, instead of facing all the miseries of travel, when unable to make the least use of his limbs, and when his very appearance "presented a spectacle of the highest horror"; and he adds "I began to prepare my family for the voyage with the utmost expedition." Twice, however, the captain put off his sailing, and at length his passenger invited him to dinner at Ealing, a full week after the declared date of departure. Meanwhile Fielding's condition seems at least to have become no worse, for the _Public Advertiser_ of June 22 has "the pleasure to assure the Publick that the Report of the Death of Henry Fielding Esquire; inserted in an Evening paper of Thursday is not true, that Gentleman's Health being better than it has been for some Month's past."