The most judicious of the medical gentlemen whose aid I invoked, was, I think, the one who replied to my inquiry for his bill, "What for? I have done you no good, and have learned more from you than you have from me." This constitutes the entire history of my medical experience, and is mentioned as being the only, and a very small adjunct to the great remedy--patient, persistent, obstinate endurance. So exceeding slow has been the process toward the restoration of a natural condition of the system, that writing now, at the expiration of more than a year since opium was finally abandoned, it seems to me very uncertain when, if ever, this result will be reached. Between four and five months elapsed before I was at all capable of commanding my attention or controlling the nervous impatience of mind and body. I then assented to a proposal which involved the necessity of a good deal of steady work, in the hope that constant occupation would divert the attention from the nervousness under which I suffered and would restore the self-reliance which had so long failed me. It was a foolish experiment, and might have proved a fatal one. The business I had undertaken required a clear head and average health, and I had neither. The sleep was short and imperfect, rarely exceeding two or three hours. The chest was in a constant heat and very sore, while the previous bilious difficulties seemed in no way overcome. The mouth was parched, the tongue swollen, and a low fever seemed to have taken entire possession of the system, with special and peculiar exasperations in the muscles of the arms and legs. The difficulty of thinking to any purpose was only equalled by the reluctance with which I could bring myself to the task of holding a pen. For a few weeks, however, the necessity of not wholly disgracing myself forced me on after a poor fashion; but at the end of two months I was a used-up man. I would sit for hours looking listlessly upon a sheet of paper, helpless of originating an idea upon the commonest of subjects, and with a prevailing sensation of owning a large emptiness in the brain, which seemed chiefly filled with a stupid wonder when all this would end.