Our object with Mr. Edgerton during the month of struggle has been to assist Nature in eliminating the obsolete matters of the system by all the excretory passages as preparative to the rebuilding of his system on a healthy plan by new material. During most of the time he has suffered from a profuse and weakening diarrhea, but this we have not checked nor retarded, because it was Nature's indispensable condition precedent to the new man. His perspiration has been profuse, and that we have assisted for the same reason by every means in our power--all our baths and rubbings, our galvanism and medicine so far as used, have favored to the utmost the activity of his skin. Our repeated hot-baths have greatly relaxed him; he may have come to the end of his month so weak that he could not walk a quarter of a mile if his life depended on it. No matter. This, however alarming at first sight, is good practice. The more rapidly he has become relaxed, the further and the further we have banished pain, from whose presence a state of _tension_ is inseparable. We have not injured him. It is astonishing to any one accustomed to dealing only with the prostration of ordinary disease to see to what an extremity the opium-eater will bear to be reduced--what an extent of muscular debility he will even thrive under. If we look at him closely, we will see through all his pallor a healthy texture of skin--in all his languor a _soundness_ of vital operation which stands to his account for more valid strength, than if he could lift all the weights of Dr. Winship. Unless the opium-disease is complicated with some serious organic difficulty it is safe to carry on the process of relaxation as long as it relieves pain until the patient has just enough strength left to lift his eyelids. We have kept him up with the constant, faithful administration of beef-tea--half a tea-cupful, by slow sips, every hour or hour and a half that he was awake during day or night, but never rousing him for any purpose whatever if he showed any inclination to sleep. The nurse who does that when an opium-eater is going through his struggle should be discharged without warning. Sleep for ten minutes any time during this month is worth to nutrition alone more than a week's feeding. At the end of the month Mr. Edgerton can sleep with tolerable soundness for half an hour--even an hour at a time, and the sum of all his dozes amount to about four hours out of the twenty-four. He is still nervous, though the painful tigerish restlessness is gone. The pangs of his opium-neuralgia are also gone--or re-appear at long intervals, and much mitigated, to stay but a few minutes. He is in every respect on the upward grade. When his sleep becomes decidedly better, so that most of his night, despite frequent wakings, is consumed in it, he enters on an entirely different stage of his treatment. We stop pulling him down. We begin toning him up.