This is a novel version, Reader, of “Paradise and the Peri,” but it is as true as it is new. How else could I have converted a serious illness into a comic wellness--by what other agency could I have transported myself, as a Cockney would say, from _Dull_age to _Grin_nage? It was far from a practical joke to be laid up in ordinary in a foreign land, under the care of Physicians quite as much abroad as myself with the case; indeed, the shades of the gloaming were stealing over my prospect; but I resolved, that, like the sun, so long as my day lasted, I would look on the bright side of everything. The raven croaked, but I persuaded myself that it was the nightingale! there was the smell of the mould, but I remembered that it nourished the violets. However my body might cry craven, my mind luckily had no mind to give in. So, instead of mounting on the black long-tailed coach horse, she vaulted on her old Hobby that had capered in the Morris-Dance, and began to exhort from its back. To be sure, said she, matters look darkly enough; but the more need for the lights. Allons! Courage! Things may take a turn, as the pig said on the spit. Never throw down your cards, but play out the game. The more certain to lose, the wiser to get all the play you can for your money. Come--give us a song! chirp away like that best of cricket-players, the cricket himself. Be bowled out or caught out, but never throw down the bat. As to Health, it’s the weather of the body--it hails, it rains, it blows, it snows, at present, but it may clear up by-and-bye. You cannot eat, you say, and you must not drink; but laugh and make believe, like the Barber’s wise brother at the Barmecide’s feast. Then, as to thinness, not to flatter, you look like a lath that has had a split with the carpenter and a fall out with the plaster; but so much the better: remember how the smugglers trim the sails of the lugger to escape the notice of the cutter. Turn your edge to the old enemy, and mayhap he won’t see you! Come--be alive! You have no more right to slight your life than to neglect your wife--they are the two better halves that make a man of you! Is not life your means of living? So stick to thy business, and thy business will stick to thee. Of course, continued my mind, I am quite disinterested in this advice--for I am aware of my own immortality--but for that very reason, take care of the mortal body, poor body, and give it as long a day as you can.