While thus occupied, the debilitating air of the season weighed upon my health and spirits. I had been affected for about three days with what I regarded as the ordinary complaints of the season, when one night, after my family had retired, I found myself suddenly very ill--my symptoms being coldness, debility, and spasmodic pains. I believed myself to be attacked with cholera. I efficiently practised the artificial respiration in fresh air as before described. Gaining strength as I proceeded, I soon found a death-like coldness giving place to genial warmth. Violent exercise, with artificial breathing, was kept up some time, with such rests and full free breathings as nature required; after which, I slept, perspired profusely, and was well in the morning. This was an occurrence which sunk deep into my mind; and the more so, as I could not speak much of it, for the truth was too improbable to be believed. But the successful issue of this, my first experiment upon the dreaded disease, prepared me to act with boldness and efficiency in a case which occurred in my own house about a week after. On the 14th of August, 1849, Jane Phayre, an Irish woman in my service, of about twenty-five years of age, having been ill for four days with diarrhœa, was suddenly struck with what the French call cholera _foudroyant_--from fright. Alarmed by unwonted sounds near her window in a basement room, she mounted the window-seat to look out at the top sash, and found her face close to that of a man dying of cholera, who in his death-cramps was brought from a steamboat on a litter, and thus rested upon the pavement. The cover was lifted from his face, and the sight and the smell struck her with faintness and trembling; and with difficulty she reached her bed. I was called to go to her quickly by Eliza Fagan, who said that Jane was very bad. She had a clay-cold death-look, and a frightful blackness around her eyes. Her face, as I saw it, was livid, pinched in features, and corpse-like, and her pulse but a feeble flutter; and she seemed only to breathe from the top of her lungs. She tried, as she afterwards told me, to say, "I am dying," but her speech was husky and inarticulate. She says her sight and hearing were gone; and while Eliza and I were dragging her out of doors, she could not see the window, and did not feel her feet. We placed her in an upright position, with her back resting against a board-wall, a fresh breeze blowing full in her face. Her senses were now partially restored. I told her to breathe violently, for she must get the bad air out of her lungs and the good air in; and I showed her how she must do it. At first she said, "I can't, for something rises up in the inside." When I told her, sternly, that her life depended on it, and she must, she tried to obey me. At first, it gave her severe headache, but as soon as deep breathing was fairly begun, while I was watching her face with intense