586 WILLIAM DWIGHT WHITNEY. 



as regards labor and diet, which few are found willing or sufficiently 

 sell-controlled to maintain for any length of time. 



In a man whose life had been spent in study and investigation, and 

 who had found in them supremest pleasure, this unexpected revelation 

 of his physical condition was necessarily a severe shock. He was in 

 the midst of work well advanced towards completion. He had formed 

 projects and made engagements for the future. His intellectual force 

 was unabated. It was hard for him to stop suddenly short, and play 

 the part of a confirmed invalid. But the situation had been too clearly 

 pointed out by the physician for him to doubt the correctness of the 

 diagnosis. He bore the blow, however, with the same quiet fortitude 

 with which he had met the various trials of a life in which he had never 

 shirked a duty however distasteful, or shrunk from a task however 

 irksome or onerous. Tiiough hardly hoping to survive the allotted 

 six weeks, he set to work to fight for life on the lines laid down for 

 him with the same calmness and courage with which he would have 

 attacked a delicate and difficult problem of scholastic investigation. 

 For the time being all work was laid aside. He conformed in the 

 minutest detail to the strict regimen which had been imposed. Every 

 effort was bent towards the restoration, so far as was possible, of health. 

 The task was made as easy for him as it could be by the members 

 of his family, all of whom devoted themselves with a single eye to 

 alleviating as much as lay in their power the monotony of this en- 

 forced idleness, and to scanning with jealous watchfulness the slightest 

 sign of approaching danger. Yet, in spite of all that ardent affection 

 could do and did do, it was necessarily a grievous burden. Still it 

 was a burden uncomplainingly borne. In time, too, it was lightened. 

 The self-restraint he exercised, the rigid rule he imposed upon him- 

 self, met with a partial reward. Though it could not avert the sen- 

 tence of death which had been pronounced ujjon him, it was sufficient 

 to suspend for several years its execution. When six months after 

 Dr. Loomis again saw his patient, he made no attempt to conceal 

 his astonishment at the improvement that had been made. The 

 necessity for the most rigid adherence to the rules that had been 

 laid down for his guidance was indeed as pressing as ever ; but, 

 with these closely observed, it was reasonable to believe that there 

 was still a chance for him to accomplish much which it had been in 

 his mind to undertake. 



From this point on follows a period in Whitney's life of quiet hero- 

 ism, and, considering the situation he was in, of wonderful achieve- 

 ment. During all those years, in which I saw him not unfrequently, 



