Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

LETTERS.

My dear West,

LETTER I.

To Alfred West, Esq.

London, Dec. 10, 1838.

I congratulate you on having passed that painful, though hopeful, stage of convalescence, in which, with a lion of an appetite within, you are allowed only panada, tapioca, sago, and that entire genus of insipidities of which we may say, as did Job of the "white of an egg,' ," "Is there any taste in it?" Το give such things as these to a convalescent appetite is like feeding the full-grown Hercules with pap.

There is nothing to me more amusing or gratifying, than to see a patient, who, after an exhausting illness, has at length been pronounced beyond the chances of a relapse, fairly dismissed by his physician, to what is to him the great business of life—the re-edification of the dilapidated outer man. Lean and gaunt as a wolf, ye gods! what an insatiable maw the man has! How does all thought, feeling, affection, centre in that one thing of satisfying which yet is an impossibility-the appetite: it is as if brain, and heart, and soul, had all gone to reside in the stomach. Withwhat gusto and infinite relish does he accept the small

B

« AnteriorContinuar »