This conversion of mine to their own opinion--or, if the reader will so have it, my return to rationality--had a favourable effect on my doctors. They removed (very circumspectly indeed) the strait jacket from my arms; and then, seeing I made no attempt to tear them to pieces, but was, on the contrary, very quiet and submissive, and that, instead of claiming to be Charlemagne the Second of France, I was content to be Mr. Arthur Megrim, of Virginia, they were so well satisfied of the cure they had effected, that they agreed to free me of their company, and so left me in the sole charge of Tibbikens and my affectionate sister. In this manner I was cured of hypochondriasis; for although I felt, ever and anon, a strong propensity to confess myself a joint-stool, a Greek demigod, or some such other fanciful creature, I retained so lively a recollection of the penalties I had already paid for indulging in such vagaries, that I put a curb on my imagination, and resolved for the future to be nothing but plain Mr. Megrim, a gentleman with a disordered digestive apparatus. I was cured of my hypochondriasis--I may say, also, of my dyspepsy--being kept by Tibbikens and my sister in such a starved condition, that it was impossible I should ever more complain of indigestion. But I was not yet cured of my melancholy; nothing but canvass-backs and terapins could cure that--and these, alas! were never more to bless my lips. Tibbikens had pronounced their fate, and with them, mine: thenceforth and for ever my diet was to be looked for in those--next to my digestive apparatus--chief favourites of my sister, bran bread and hickory ashes; my stomach, he solemnly assured me, would never be able to sustain any thing else. I say, therefore, I was melancholy; and great reason had I to be so, condemned to live a life of ascetic denial, with the means in my hand to purchase all the luxuries in the world, and, which was worse, an eternal desire to enjoy them. To banish this melancholy--alas! never to be banished--and perhaps to give me a little appetite for my bran bread and ashes, for which I never could contract a relish, the friendly Tibbikens again seduced me into the open air and my carriage, and carried me about to different places in which he thought I might find amusement. In this way he had conducted my prototype, the true Arthur Megrim, before me, whenever indolence and the luxuries of the table brought him too near to dyspepsy; and it was this uncommon kindness of the physician, in dragging the unfortunate gentleman to witness the galvanic experiments on the bodies of the executed felons, which had helped him so suddenly out of his own. Dr. Tibbikens was not, indeed, very choice whither he carried me, lugging me along with equal alacrity to a horse-race, a barbacue, or to the bedsides of his patients.