Five days came and went, and still Karl Konstant Kain lingered above ground, viewing the shadows go up and down on the pine box destined for his remains (a standing menace of this character now occupied one corner of his apartment), and realizing that his symptoms grew hourly worse. His old friends, the doctors, feeling some anxiety, came to examine into the matter, but after a careful diagnosis of the patient, they left with very marked abridgments of countenance and their pills. Under the circumstances, they felt that pills would only hasten the sad event. And, indeed, their prognostications seemed not ill-founded. Six hours later, a fearful coma seized his struggling anatomy and held it fast, and in a few minutes, at farthest, the last mournful rites would be in order. The pulse had become quite motionless, the suppressed breathing grew momentarily fainter,--and, aha! hold a light, nurse. What a moral is pointed in that much quoted sentiment referring to the "fate of men and empires." 'Twas but a drop of water trickling from the rain-drenched roof, and yet it had power to call a human being to life. K. K. Kain, Esq., now sat bolt upright in his straw-bed and demanded--shall we write it--would it be politic--in a word, would it be accepted as true? In such an emergency there is no alternative left to the undissembling chronicler of fact, nor do we seek one. K. Konstant Kain demanded gruel, and indeed from this moment conceived such an attachment for gruel, that it was with difficulty that their separation could be accomplished for any considerable portion of his waking moments. Nor can it be denied that gruel aided his convalescence and his complexion as nothing else but tolerably regular doses of Blooming Cereus could have done. (This joke is paid for, and on that ground it is hoped there will be no objection to it.) In two weeks, time gruel stood him on his two legs and bade him "view, the landscape o'er." In three it had brought its magician's art to bear on his sunken cheeks, and converted the yellow rose of Texas into a lively peach bloom. And in the short space of one month it had so far rehabilitated his battered hulk, that he was enabled to receive a deputation of citizens with a purse of Mexican coin, and a "gruel" request to convey himself across that border. It is needless to say that Mr. Kain accepted the _douceur_ and stood not upon the order of his going.