"A necessity more painful to me by far than that of taking continued exercise arose out of a cause which applies perhaps with the same intensity only to opium cases, but must also apply in some degree to all cases of debilitation from morbid stimulation of the nerves, whether by means of wine, or opium, or distilled liquors. In travelling on the outside of mails during my youthful days, I made the discovery that opium, after an hour or so, diffuses a warmth deeper and far more permanent than could be had from any other known source. I mention this to explain in some measure the awful passion of cold which for some years haunted the inverse process of laying aside the opium. It was a perfect frenzy of misery; cold was a sensation which then first, as a mode of torment, seemed to have been revealed. In the months of July and August, and not at all the less during the very middle watch of the day, I sat in the closest proximity to a blazing fire: cloaks, blankets, counterpanes, hearth-rugs, horse-cloths, were piled upon my shoulders, but with hardly a glimmering of relief. "At night, and after taking coffee, I felt a little warmer, and could sometimes afford to smile at the resemblance of my own case to that of Harry Gile. Meantime, the external phenomenon by which the cold expressed itself was a sense (but with little reality) of eternal freezing perspiration. From this I was never free; and at length, from finding one general ablution sufficient for one day, I was thrown upon the irritating necessity of repeating it more frequently than would seem credible if stated. At this time I used always hot water, and a thought occurred to me very seriously that it would be best to live constantly, and perhaps to sleep, in a bath. What caused me to renounce this plan was an accident that compelled me for one day to use cold water. This, first of all, communicated any lasting warmth; so that ever afterward I used none _but_ cold water. Now to live in a cold bath in our climate, and in my own state of preternatural sensibility to cold, was not an idea to dally with. I wish to mention, however, for the information of other sufferers in the same way, one change in the mode of applying the water which led to a considerable and a sudden improvement in the condition of my feelings. I had endeavored in vain to procure a child's battledore, as an easy means (when clothed with sponge) of reaching the interspace between the shoulders. In default of a battledore, therefore, my necessity threw my experiment upon a long hair-brush; and this, eventually, proved of much greater service than any sponge or any battledore, for the friction of the brush caused an irritation on the surface of the skin, which, more than any thing else, has gradually diminished the once continual misery of unrelenting frost, although even yet it renews itself most distressingly at uncertain intervals.