us. I have forgotten the exact price which he demanded for board and lodging: but it was something extremely insignificant-not more, certainly, than three dollars a week. It was so much like gratuitous hospitality, that we sent a porter to the Golden Star for our trunks, and followed the superintendent to one of the cottages. We found it a very rustic one, built of raw clap-boards, and approached through a puddie, the overrummings of a neighboring watertrough. It had begun life, indeed, as a stable; but we objected very little to that, as the scent of quadruped life had been totally exercised from its breezy chambers. The floors and partitions were of the consistency of pasteboard, and we saw at once that, if we did not wish to disturb our neighbors, we must live in a whisper. Everything was of unsophisticated pine-the walls, the narrow bedsteads, the chairs, and the aguish wash-stands.

There were only three chambers for four of us, and but one of them was double-bedded and double-chaired. We tossed up kreutzers for the single rooms. Irwine got one of them, and Burroughs the other. While the trunks were coining we commenced a dance, in celebration of our advent, thinking that, perhaps, we should never feel like it again. Presently we heard a yell of fury from some profundity below, accompanied by a double knock against the floor under our feet, from what seemed to be a pair of boots. We paused in our shaker exercises, questioning what abodes of torture might exist beneath us, and what lost mortal or demon might inhabit them. We afterwards found that a neuralgic Russian lived on the first floor, and that, feeling annoyed by our clamor, he had sought to mend matters by howling and throwing his shoe-leather about.

Presently, we all gathered in the passage to catechise a young Englishinan, who was, also, (in) stalled in our ex-stable. Having been three months under treatment, he could give us some idea of what we were to do and to suffer; but, in the very middle of his talk, he was imperiously summoned away, by a moist, cool executioner, armed with a wet sheet. In a moment more we heard, with mingled mirth and horror, the rasping splash of the dripping linen, as it fell upon our friend's devoted body; and, a quarter of an hour afterwards, we saw him hurry out, with wet locks, and make

off, at a shivering canter, for the mountain paths.

By half-past twelve we were bearing our empty, expectant stomachs up and down the great eating-hall. Patients followed patients through the creaking doors, until nearly two hundred sick, blind, and deformed people were hun grily patrolling around the long tables. Eight or ten neat, curiously white-faced damsels hurried in and out, loaded with piles of plates, or with monstrous loaves, of what seemed to be mahoga ny bread. Presently they all entered in a column, bearing spacious, smoking platters of neat and vegetables, prepared, as I afterwards found, by cooks of Satan's providing. No other signal was necessary to the famished invalids, who immediately made for the tables at a pace which reminded one of the fast-trotting boarders of a Western hotel. However sick they may have been in other respects, they were certainly well enough to eat; and I think I never saw, before nor since, such an average large appetite among such a number of people. A disgracefully dirty man, with an ugly swelled face, who sat on our left, filled his plate three or four inches deep with every kind of provender, ate it up, and then did it again, and a third time, as if it were no feat at all. We afterwards learned that Priessnitz counseled his patients to cat all they wished, the more the better; for the old peasant was as perversely ignorant of a stomach as if he carried a crop and digested with pebbles, like a chicken; maintaining, among other heresies, that a waterpatient's gastric powers should be strengthened by hard work, as much as his legs by hard walking. Partly, in consequence of this monstrous theory, and partly, because of the native savageness of Silesian cookery, the food was of the worst description, consisting of such horrors as veal ten days old, sauer kraut, and the most unsusceptible dough-balls. Such a diet would produce a galloping dyspepsia in any one who was not invigorated by frequent baths and wet rubbings; but, as things were, I imagine that no great harm was done, and that, in a general way, two hundred ostriches could not have digested better. A man, who takes four cold duckings per diem, walks five or six miles after each of them, and wears a wet bandage over

his abdomen, may confide, even to recklessness, in his gastric juices.

When we came to discuss the doughballs above-mentioned, a German astonished us, by saying that they were the favorite dish of the Emperor Ferdinand of Austria. "Yes," said he, "with those they coax him to sign state papers. He is rather childish now; and thinks it is a great bore to be always putting his signature to proclamations and treaties. Accordingly, Schwartzenberg tells him that, if he will write his name so many times, he shall have dough-balls for dinner."

Our meal closed with spacious fruitpies, not much less than two feet in diameter. All these indigestibles gave our stomachs exercise until six o'clock, when the table was set again with the fragments of the mahogany loaves, and pitchers of sweet and sour milk. At ten we went to bed, and discovered that we were expected to keep warm with one blanket apiece, although the wea ther was chilly enough to palliate the use of four. For fear of a wet sheet, however, or some other such cold comfort, we took care to call for no additional covering, and supplied the hiatus for the night with our plaids and over

coats.

II.

FIRST DIPS IN GRAEFENBERG.

EARLY in the morning, Priessnitz came into our room, followed by Franz, the bathman, and by Irwine, who lent himself as interpreter. I saw before me a medium-sized person, with weather-beaten features; a complexion which would have been fair but for deep sun-burn; eyes of blue inclining to gray; thin light-brown hair touched in with silver, and an expression reserved, composed, grave, and earnest. He sometimes smiled very pleasantly, but he spoke little, and wore, in general, an air of quiet, simple dignity. Altogether, I felt as if I were in the presenco of a kindly-tempered man of superior mind, accustomed to command, and habitually confident in his own powers. I afterwards observed that he kept the same impassive self-possession in the pres ence of every one, were it even the highest noble of the Austrian empire.

He listened to a brief history of my malady, seeming very indifferent to its past symptoms, but examining attent

ively the color of my skin, and the development of my muscles. He then ordered the wet sheet to be spread, and signed me to stretch myself in it. As soon as I had measured my length on the dripping linen, Franz folded me up rapidly, and then packed me thickly in blankets and coverlets, as if I were a batch of dough set away to rise. Neuville followed my damp example; and our teeth were soon chattering in chilly sympathy. Having noted the intensity of our ague, as if it were a means of judging what degree of vigor in the treatment we could bear, Priessnitz marched off to survey the agonies of Irwine and Burroughs. Neuville and I remained as fixed, and nearly as moist, as King Log in the pond, but in a state of anguish far beyond the capacities of that solid potentate. We were so cold that we could not speak plainly, and shivered until our bedsteads caught the infection. Then a change came a graduated, almost unconscious change to warmth-and, at the end of ten minutes, it was hard to say whether we were uncomfortable or not. few minutes more brought a sensation of absolute physical pleasure, and I began to think that, after all, water was my element, and that it was quite a mistake that I was not furnished with tasty red fins like a perch, or a convenient long tail, for sculling, like a polliwog.

A

Just at this pleasant stage of the experiment, when I would have been glad to continue it longer, Priessnitz came back and declared us ready for the plunge-bath. Franz turned up the blanket so as to leave my feet and ankles free, shod me with a pair of straw slippers, set me unsteadily upright, like a staggering ninepin, took firm hold of my cuvelopments behind, and started me on my pilgrimage. I set off at the rate of a furlong an hour, which was the top of my possiblo speed under the circumstances. Forming a little procession, with Priessnitz ahead as the officiating priest, then myself as the walking corpse, and then Franz as sexton, we moved solemnly on, until we reached a stairway leading into a most gloomy and lowspirited cellar. Dark, rude, dirty flagstones were visible at the bottom; while, from an unseen corner, bubbled the threatening voice of a runlet of water. The stair was so steep, and the steps so narrow, that it seemed impos

sible to descend without pitching forward, and, confiding myself desperately to the attraction of gravitation, I cautiously raised my left foot, made a pivot of the right one, wheeled half a diameter, settled carefully down six inches, wheeled back again to a front face, brought my dextral foot down, and found myself on the first step. Ten repetitions of this delicate and complicated manoeuvre carried me to the flooring of the cellar.

Franz now engineered me into a sideroom, and halted me alongside of an oblong cistern, brimming with black water, supplied by a brooklet, which fell into it with a perpetual chilly gurgle. In a moment his practiced fingers had peeled me like an orange, only far quicker than any orange was ever yet stripped of its envelop. As I shuffled off the last tag of that humid coil, the steam curled up from my body, as from an acceptable sacrifice, or an ear of hot boiled corn. Priessnitz pointed to the cistern, like an angel of destiny signing to my tomb; and I bolted into it in a hurry, as wise people always bolt out of the frying-pan into the fire, when there is no help for it. In a minute my whole surface was so perfectly iced that it felt hard, smooth, and glossy, like a skin of marble. I got out on the first symptom of permission, when Franz set about rubbing me down, with a new linen sheet, still possessed of all its native asperity. If I had been a mammoth or an ichthyosaurus, with a cuticle a foot thick, he could not have put more emphasis into his efforts to bring my blood back to a vigorous circulation. Priessnitz joined in as if he enjoyed the exercise, and honored me with a searching attrition from his knowing fingers. Then, after examining me, to see if I grew healthfully rosy under the excitement, he signed me to throw a dry sheet over my shoulders, and give myself an air-bath before a window, into which a fresh morning breeze was pouring. Holding tight with both hands to the corners of the sheet, I flapped my linen wings as if I were some gigantic bat or butterfly, about to take flight through the orifice, and soar away over the meadows. "Goot!" said Priessnitz, nodding his solemn head in token of ample satisfaction; and, folding my drapery around me, I marched up-stairs, like a statue looking for a pedestal, or a belated ghost,

returning to its church-yard. I met Neuville descending with a stiffness of dignity which made me think of Bunker Hill Monument walking down to get a bath in the harbor; so woefully solemn, so dubious about his footing, so bolt upright and yet so tottering, that he would have shaken the gravity of a pyramid, or moved a weeping crocodile to laughter. Once more in the double-bedded chamber, I gave myself a few hurried rubs of supererogation. and was about dressing, when Neuville and Franz reappeared from the lower regions. With shivering fingers I seized my thick under-wrapper, and proceeded to don it, with a glorious sense of anticipatory comfort. But that atocious Franz saw it, snatched it, tucked it under his arm, made a grab next at my drawers and stockings, and then signified, by menacing signs, that I was to leave my cloak on its nail. No luckless urchin in Dotheboys Hall was ever stripped half so pitilessly. As for Neuville, who had been toasting himself over American fires through the mediocre chill of a Florentine winter, and was as sensitive to wind as a butterfly, or a weathercock, or Mr. Jarndyce himself, he was despoiled with the same hyperboreau unkindness. Out we went, nearly as thinly dressed as Adam and Eve, but leaving no Paradise behind us; forth we hurried, driven by Franz, that bald-headed cherub, horribly armed with a wet sheet; away into the woods we fled. to wander like Caius, and drink three or four tumblers of water before we might venture back to breakfast.

I took my first taste at the Housefountain, and swallowed a pint with difficulty. I seemed to be choke-full of water; oozing with it at every pore, like the earth in spring-time; ready to brim over with it if I were turned ever so little off my perpendicular; fit to boil and steam like a tea-kettle, should I incautiously venture near a fire. It is astonishing how much moisture can be absorbed into the system through the skin; how nearly a man can resemble a water-logged ship, or a dropsical cucumber.

It was a raw, misty morning-as are nearly all Graefenberg mornings-and the chill humidity crept like a breath of ice through our thin remainder of raiment. Loose and shaky, from our coat-skirts to our teeth, we ambled up

the hill, back of the establishment, in hopes of sheltering ourselves in its woods from an ill-dispositioned wind, which blows, year in and year out, over those unfortunate landscapes. People passed us or met us every minute-some just starting out, in a state of aguish misery; some returning, rosy and happy in their triumphant reaction. The wide path, moistened here and there by spacious puddles, entered the forest, and wound gradually up the nountain. At every hundred yards or so, smaller tracks diverged through the thickets, or a bubbling fountain reminded the passer that it was time to quench his thirst, if he had any. There must have been twenty miles of pathway around Graefenberg, all, or nearly ail of which had been paid for out of a small weekly tax levied on the patients. Several score of fountains, some of them mere wooden troughs, others basins or obelisks of stone, had been erected by means of this same revenue. Then there was a bronze lion, and two other monuments of considerable cost, dedicated to the honor of Priessnitz, one by the Prussian patients, one by the Hungarians, and the third, I believe, by some noble or other.

Now and then we found some favorite fountain surrounded by invalids, chatting cosily, or pausing to drain their cups, and reminding one of a parcel of hens clucking and drinking about a water-trough. Neuville and I made a very respectable pedestrian effort that morning, and returned to the house with anxious voids in our stomachs, notwithstanding that we occasionally stopped to refill them with water. I should have mentioned that Franz had surcingled us with broad linen bandages, of which the two first turns were wet, and the two last dry, so as to constitute altogether a kind of towel-and-water poultice. This is the finest digestive aid or curative that I know of; as much superior to stomachic pills and cordials as it is nearer to nature.

Breakfast was on the table, as it had been for two hours, when we entered the eating-hall. Like the last night's supper, it consisted of sweet and sour milk, with the usual rye and barley bread. By the time we had swallowed a disgraceful quantity of this simple nutriment, our waist-bandages were dry, and required a new wetting. Then we repaired to a booth and bought stout

canes, with iron foot-spikes and curved handles, the thickest and fiercest that could be had. Then we debated whether we should get drinking-horns to wear over our shoulders, or drinking-cups to carry in our pockets. At last we decided in favor of the cups, and resolved to visit Freiwaldau after dinner, and choose some handsome ones of Bohemian glass. Then eleven o'clock arrived, and Franz had us away to sit face to face, for fifteen minutes, in tubs of cold water. at the end of which he polished us off with wet sheets in lieu of sand-paper. Then we got ashamed of the effeminacy of hats, and walked out conspicuously under bare polls and green umbrellas. At one o'clock came dinner, which gave us hard work in the digestive and peripatetic line for some hours afterwards. At five, Franz wanted to put us in the wet sheet again, and would not take "no" for an answer. Then we had to walk half an hour or more to get warm; and, by the time we returned, it was necessary to eat more sour milk and mahogany. Then we remoistened bandages, preparatory to trotting for an hour or two up and down the great, ill-lighted hall, in company with scores of other uncomfortable people. The room was naturally chilly, built so expressly and by malice aforethought. as I believe; in addition to which, that rascally superintendent delighted in throwing open an elevated range of windows, thereby giving copious ingress to a damp wind that wandered among our shivering forms like the ghost of a wet sheet. Nine o'clock sent Franz after us, who insisted on wetting our bandages and putting us immediately to bed, in as comfortless a state as half-drowned puppies. Repeatedly in the night we woke, aching with cold-for our rations of bed-clothing were still restricted to a single blanket. At five in the morning, Franz was upon us, like the Philistines upon Sampson, or like Sampson upon the Philistines (for it seems to have been nip and tuck between those old fellows)

dragging us down again into those awful nether regions of wet pavements, brooks, and cisterns.

It was astonishing how rapidly we became fanaticized under the influence of the cure, and the example of our fellow-invalids. Before a week was over, I had discarded all my woolen garments of every cut, and wore linen from head

to foot, in a temperature like that of a New England March, or a Charleston December. It blew every ininute, and rained nearly as often; yet we caught no colds, and were savagely indifferent to our discomforts. All this, too. was in despite of sarcastic declarations, made on our arrival, that we would dress and behave like civilized people, and not like the slouching, bare-headed, bare-footed fanatics around us.

It was, also, remarkable how this general carelessness in exteriors depreciated the average beauty of the patients. Among the five hundred persons who were under cure in Graefenberg and Freiwaldau, there must have been a number with some natural claims to comeliness; but, by dint of shabby clothes, cropped hair, and neglected beards, this favored few had melted away into the great aggregate of ugliness, or retained, like Lucifer, only a doubtful halo of former beauty. One of our party, a man of sensitive nerves, complained that the daily spectacle of such a deteriorated humanity made him unwell, and that he never should convalesce until he could see some handsome people.

III.

CERTAIN GRAEFENBERGHERS.

NEUVILLE and I had a pearl of a bathman. He was a strong, slow, blue-eyed, light-colored, Silesian peasant, who had once possessed a scalp full of sandy hair, but had lost at least half of it in his journey to middle life. His whole appearance, and especially his smooth, shining pate, reeked with an indescrib ably cool, dewy expression, which made one think of cucumbers, wet pebbles, drenched roses, or heads of lettuce after a shower. Neuville insisted that he gained this fresh appearance by living on such things as celery and watercresses, and by sleeping in one of the cisterns, or, perhaps, down a well like a bull-frog. It may be, indeed, that the instinct of association deceived us, and that we imputed this aqueous nature to the man solely because he had so much to do with our baths; but however that was, we certainly never looked at him without being impressed with the idea that he would slice up cold and juicy, like a melou or a tomato.

Franz exhibited a forty-hostler power in rubbing us down, and had, perhaps, curried the hides of our quadruped pre

decessors in the building. In fact, when I think of his frictions, and consider how wet I was at the time, I almost wonder that I was not rubbed out of existence, like a pencil-mark. Occasionally it was impossible not to shout or stamp under the excitation, at which times the old Russian below would bombard our floor with his boots, in token of disapprobation.

Among so many homely people as we had about us, there were necessarily some whose ugliness ran into eccentricity, if not absurdity. Neuville, who had an extraordinary faculty at discovering resemblances between men and beasts, or birds, soon fixed on one old gentleman as the Owl; and I was obliged to confess that, bating the lack of claws, the said human certainly did bear a striking likeness to the solemn anchorite of ornithology. He was a man of about sixty, with light gray hair, light gray beard, and a light gray suit of clothes-so that, from a distance, you might suppose him to be dressed in light gray feathers. He was tolerably bare of chin, and his mouth had retired into obscurity under a bower of light gray moustachios. His long, curved hose looked wonderfully like a beak, and his eyes were always wide open with an expression of unqualified astonishment. However early we rose, however fast and far we went, we invariably met him already returning, as if he had started out for his morning walk some time the day previous. Neuville affirmed that he stayed in the woods all night, and amused himself with hooting and chasing field-mice until daybreak, when he would leave off at the approach of the earliest patients, and hurry down to the establishment to take a bath.

Another interesting personage was a middle-aged, muscular Hungarian, with startling black eyes and wavy black beard, who had the fame of being crazy, or at least unreasonably original. He carried an enormous yellow cane, one end of which was fashioned into a passable flute. He always walked alone, like a man who had dealings with fairies and wood-nymphs, and, when he thought no human being was within hearing, he would put his cane to his lips, and treat his elfin friends to a melody. If a wandering fellow-patient came upon him in one of these dulcet moments, he dropped the end of his caue, whisked it about unconcernedly, and looked all around,