By looking over the memorial of my professional life; and writing out the extended details of my experience, I am, in effect, living my life over again. Most of the scenes I witnessed left such an impression upon my mind, that it requires only the touch of the _caduceus_ of the witching power of memory, to call them all up again with a vividness scarcely less than that by which they were formerly presented to me. There is only this difference, that my remembered experiences, now invested with a species of borrowed light, seem like scenery which one has seen in the glance of a mid-day sun, presented again to the dreamy "evening sense" under the soft blue effulgence of the waning harvest-moon; the trees with the sere leaf rustling under the fluttering wing of the night bird; and the dead silence, which is not broken by the internal voice speaking the words that have been spoken by those who lie under the yew tree. In an early leaf of my journal, I find some broken details of a visit I paid to Mr B----, a rich manufacturer in the town where I began my practice; but which I left when I had more confidence in those humble powers of ministering to the afflicted, which have raised me to an honourable station, and supplied me with the means of passing my old age in affluence. This individual had lost his wife--a very amiable woman, with whom he had lived a period of twenty-five years--and took on grief so heavily, that he was unfit to attend the funeral. He lay in bed, and would not be comforted. Having attended his wife, I continued my attentions to the husband. Three days had passed since his wife had been buried, and during all that time, he had eaten nothing; and, what augured gloomily for his fate, he had never been heard to speak, or sigh, or even to give vent to his sufferings in a single groan. There seemed to have fallen over him a heavy load, which, pressing with deadly force upon the issues of life, defied those reacting energies of nature, which usually struggle, by sighs and groans, to throw off the incubus of extraordinary griefs.