iS2 OCCASIONAL HAPPY THOUGHTS. 



INIustard Plaster ; " but he gives in to Cazell, who is in his 

 element, while telling us what it is and what I ought to do. 



" You feel languid ! " he says. 



I do. 1 own it. 



" Of course you do," he continues, triumphantly. " You 

 liave a pain in your right hypochondrium ; you have a nasty, 



troublesome cough " (I nod my head. He is right.) 



" You experience some difficulty in breathing " 



" Not much," I interpose. Englemore murmurs some- 

 thing about " Benjamin Bellows ; " but as this does not 

 appear to have any more than a merely marginal reference to 

 the subject in hand, Cazell goes on deprecatingly, 



" No, not ?;i7/r/i : that is, in an advanced stage. Now you 

 liave a difficulty of which you are scarcely conscious, and it 

 arises from secretions of mucus in the bronchial tubes, which 

 anyone can ascertain by percussion, and by the sounds of 

 sonorous and sibilant rhonchi in the first stage. Then, of 

 course, if the central canal won't act, and the biliary ducts 

 can't do their duty, the whole system gets out of order, and 

 can only be restored by the greatest care." 



I begin to think I am ve7y ill — much worse than I had 

 expected to find myself Even Boodells, by his change 

 of manner, seems tacitly to acknowledge, that, at last, I have 

 outdone him, and that I am really an invalid. 



I am not skilled in medical terms, but, after Cazell's lec- 

 ture, I am so depressed in one sense, and yet so cheered in 

 another (that is, to find that I am worthy of commiseration, 

 and not the feeble-minded yielder to a pain in my little finger 

 that Boodells would have made me out to be) that I am in- 



