“How are you?” is the question on meeting an acquaintance. “First-rate, although I have my old sick headaches occasionally.” Another replies, “Pretty well, _now_——have just had a touch of neuralgia——you know I always had that now and then.” Another has a “bad cold in the head.” Smith enjoys good health, although “troubled a good deal with dyspepsia, constipation, etc.,” which means that he is constantly annoyed by symptoms inseparable from his disease. Jones is “tip-top,” with an occasional “attack” of cholera-morbus, or a bilious spell. Brown “never was better in his life,” but could tell you of a fearful sickness last spring——“like to have died,” and no wonder——he had three drug doctors and a gallstone! Robinson is “tough as a knot”——just now——since getting cleaned out by erysipelas——an eruption of the accumulated poison resulting from his bad habits. It was a fearful “attack,” as he says! “The doctor called it the worst case he ever saw——my head was swelled so I couldn’t see for weeks——used up a bushel of cranberries in poultices, when I had counted on having cranberry sauce all winter——did not get a spoonful.” Of course Robinson exaggerates about the quantity of cranberries. Tom, one of the healthiest-looking specimens, recently had typhoid fever and came near dying. Mrs. Dick had “slow fever” the past summer and managed to keep it a-going for three months. She says it was a dreadful “attack”; and she tries to explain it by saying that several years ago, she had it every summer for three summers, and “it generally leaves the seeds in the system!” Harry’s wife had stoppage and inflammation of the bowels——a deadly sickness for six months, entailing infinite distress on the large family that needed her about so much. “The doctor’s big bill isn’t paid yet,” she mourns, “and mercy only knows when it will be.” She has always been a well woman, so-called, has always seemed pretty well until this terrible disease “attacked” her. The list is endless, of the so-called healthy ones who have been from time to time “attacked” with one disorder or another and recovered,——while the mortality reports from week to week tell the final story of the premature taking off of thousands of men, women, and children who, although always regarded by themselves and friends as healthy, have suffered the death-penalty after a longer or shorter imprisonment.