Moreover, we should not venture upon this violent emotion of the cold bath without a preliminary course of warm bathing, to facilitate absorption. Our skin which is entirely composed of the little mouths which we call pores, and which, in its way, both absorbs and digests, as the stomach does, wants time to get accustomed to such strong nourishment as the _mucus_ of the sea, that salted milk with which the sea makes and remakes such myriads of creatures. By a graduated course of baths, hot, warm, lukewarm, and almost cold, the skin acquires this habit, and, so to speak, this appetite; and "increase of appetite grows by what it feeds on." For the hard ceremony of the first cold sea-water baths, at least, the odious gaze of a mob of people is to be avoided. Let them be taken in private and with no one present but a perfectly reliable person who, at need, will help the nervous patient, and rub her with hot cloths and revive her with warm drinks containing a few drops of the potent elixir. "But," it may be said, "the presence of other bathers lessens the danger; we are far different from Virginia, who, in an extreme danger, preferred drowning herself to taking a bath." A great mistake; we are more nervous now than ever we were. And the impression of which I speak is at once so vivid and so revolting--I mean for nervous people--that it is quite capable of killing, by aneurism or apoplexy. I love the people, but I hate a mob; especially a noisy mob of fast livers who come to sadden the great Sea with their noise, their fashions, and their absurdities. What! Is not the land large enough? Must such people come to the Sea to martyrize the sick and to vulgarize the majesty of the Sea, that wild and true grandeur?