Richard began (though he progressed favourably) to get exceedingly nervous; he thought he could never live to leave his room, and to fancy that he could not swallow. I proposed to take him away, and the doctors told me they would be only too glad if it were possible to move him. It was the end of July, so I went up to the rural inn, Opçina, before mentioned, took a ground-floor suite of rooms, ordered a carriage with a bed in it, and an invalid chair for carrying up and down stairs; so when he told me that he thought he should never get away, I told him that he certainly would, for that I meant him to go on the morrow. He said it was _impossible_, that he never could be conveyed below. However, next morning the men came with the chair, the carriage was at the door, and he said smiling, "Do you know, I am absolutely sweating with funk." Fancy how ill that man of iron must have been, who could travel where and as he had travelled, and yet dreaded going down the stairs for an hour's journey in a carriage; but it was the seventy-ninth day of endurance. I made the men put him gently in the chair, and gave him a glass of port wine. We had a hundred and twenty steps to go down, and I made them pause on every landing while I gave him a stimulant, and then we put him gently in the carriage in a recumbent position on a bed, and telling the man to walk his horses, I sat by him and held his hand. After about a quarter of an hour he said, "I am all right; tell him to drive on." We then drove on, and in an hour reached the inn, where I had men waiting to lift him gently into bed. He said, "I feel as if I had made a journey into Central Africa; but I shall get well now." In a couple of days he was breakfasting and basking out in the garden, and in twelve days I took him on to Padua, where there was a celebrated old doctor (Pinalli), whom I called in. He stayed an hour and a half, and overhauled Richard thoroughly. He said he should go for five days to Battaglia, and that nature and bicarbonate of soda would do the rest. Then he looked round at me, who had been on duty night and day two months and a half. He said, "As for you, you've got gastric fever, and you will go to Recoaro for four weeks; and you will drink the waters, which are purgative and iron, take the baths, and have complete rest." We drove to Battaglia, which is about seven and a half miles away; our traces broke, and we spent some time mending them with bits of string; but I got him there and conveyed him to bed, and here he bathed and took the waters, which are especially for gout.