It is doubtless easiest to comply at the moment of such exactions, at any sacrifice of subsequent health and nerve: but it should be remembered that the sacrifice is not of health alone. The posthumous love must suffer;--or if not the love, the respect for the departed. It is impossible to love one who appears in a selfish aspect,--though it be the merest mask, most briefly worn,--so well as the countenance that never concealed its benevolence for a moment. Let then the timely thought of the future,--a provident care for the memory of the dying friend, suggest the easy prudence which may obviate encroachment. Let the bewildered sufferer be frequently and cheerfully told the hour,--and informed that such an one is going to rest, to be replaced by another for so many hours. A little forethought and resource may generally prevent the great evil I speak of: and if not, true sympathy requires that there should be a cheerful word of remonstrance--or let us call it rectification. So may it be with me, if so lingering a departure be appointed! Thus would every one say beforehand; and it seems to me a sin against every one’s moral rights not to take him at his word. NATURE TO THE INVALID. “O mighty love! Man is one world and hath Another to attend him!” GEORGE HERBERT. “Let us find room for this great guest in our small houses.” _Emerson._ “Shut not so soon! The dull-eyed night Has not as yet begun To make a seizure of the light, Or to seal up the sun.” HERRICK. When an invalid is under sentence of disease for life, it becomes a duty of first-rate importance to select a proper place of abode. This is often overlooked; and a sick prisoner goes on to live where he lived before, for no other reason than because he lived there before. Many a sufferer languishes amidst street noises, or passes year after year in a room whose windows command dead walls, or paved courts, or some such objects; so that he sees nothing of Nature but such sky and stars as show themselves above the chimney-tops. I remember the heart-ache it gave me to see a youth, confined to a recumbent posture for two or three years, lying in a room whence he could see nothing, and dependent therefore on the cage of birds by his bed-side, and the flowers his friends sent him, for the only notices of Nature that reached him, except the summer’s heat and winter’s cold. There was no sufficient reason why he should not have been placed where he could overlook fields, or even the sea.