Equally, the man who is always well, becomes a nuisance after a time. His ruddy face hangs out a constant banner of presumptuous defiance, and the only person who can conscientiously love him is a life insurance agent. He never knows the soft ministrations of small female hands, or the hygienic virtue in the hem of an old lady's robe. Consequently his milk of human kindness is very apt to freeze up. He can have but small sympathy, for no one can sympathize, who has not learned sympathy by experience. At this present moment I fairly burn with pity, and extend a red right hand of sympathy to every man, woman and child, who has ever had a fever, who has a fever now, or who is going to have a fever. In his great, strong animal existence he goes crashing and smashing about like a whale among minnows, with this difference--that the whale is bent upon legitimate prey, while your healthy man is simply trying to show that he _is_ a whale. As who should say, "Here am I, Mr. Merryman, the great American Healthist. Any lady or gentleman in the audience, wishing to show liver, lights or lungs, will please step forward into the arena." But, of course, there are compensations for all this. In the next world our healthy friend will probably take twice as much punishment as some of the poor devils who took half of theirs before they went there. A person whose wings have sprouted and grown, and who has become a precocious angel in the prescribed three score and ten, is certainly leaving a very narrow margin for angelic growth hereafter, and, equally, a man who goes through his three score and ten without any terrene ails, I fancy will need Hippocrates and Galen when he gets to the other shore. At least, so it seems to a man flat on his back. * * * * * * * * * Which stars are to be considered equivalent to the time consumed in taking the sugar-coated pill before referred to, reminding one, in its passage down the æsophagus, of the cathartic literature which St. John swallowed, sweet above and bitter below. Which recalls to me that the most of us are more or less sugar-coated--sweet outside, but quite bitter, or quite sad, or quite bad inside. The partition between body and soul with some of us is so thin that the light shines through easily. Some of us, again, cover up our little sepulchres so thickly with vines and roses, and fix such a laughing mask on the door, that we pass for very Ariels, God help us! While others of us still, living in ourselves, isolated from all intimate relations, carry in our faces no sign of the toil and the weariness and the struggle. It is all blank on the outside; on the inside, it is isolation, death and expiation.