Reader, I have, in the course of this history, related to thee many miseries which it was my lot, on different occasions, to encounter, and some of them of a truly cruel and insupportable character. Could I, however, give thee a just conception of the ills I was now doomed to suffer, which, of a certainty, I cannot do, unless thou art at this moment the victim of a similar infliction, I am convinced thou wouldst agree with me, that I had now stumbled upon a grief that concentrated in itself all others of which human nature is capable. Dost thou know what it is to have thy stomach stuffed, like an ostrich's, with old iron hoops and brickbats--or feeling as if it were? to have it now drowned in vinegar, now scorched as with hot potatoes? thy head filled with achings, dizziness, and streaks of lightning? thy heart transformed into the heels of a hornpipe-dancer, and plying thy ribs, lungs, and diaphragm with the energy of an _artiste_ in the last agony? If thou dost, then thou wilt know that bodily distress, of which the above miseries form but a small portion, is the least of the evils of dyspepsy--that its most horrible symptoms develop themselves in the mind. What care those devils, falsely called blue (for they are as black as midnight, or the bile which engenders them), for the youth, the wealth, the independence, the gentility of a man whose digestive apparatus is out of order? The less cause he may have in reality to be dissatisfied with his lot, the more cause they will find him; the greater and more legitimate his claims to be a happy man, the more fierce and determined their efforts to make him a miserable one.