reconstruction. We know now that life is a constant death and a
renewing,--that our every-day nutrition involves millions of molecular
deaths and as many millions of births,--although to liken that which is
so exquisitely managed, so undisturbingly done, to the coarser phenomena
of death and birth is in a measure misleading.

Diseases such as typhoid fever, or a sharp local lung-trouble like
pneumonia, really do make these minute changes approximate in abruptness
to death. You weigh, let us say, one hundred and eighty pounds, and you
drop in three weeks of a fever to one hundred and thirty pounds. The
rest of you is dead. You have lost, as men say, fifty pounds, but your
debt to disease, or to the blunders of civilization, for it is a case of
creditor behind creditor, is paid. Your capital is much diminished, but
you have come out of the trial with an amazing renovation of energy.
This is the happy convalescence of the wholesome man. The other, the
unlucky, fellow, does not get as safely through the cleansing bankruptcy
of disease. The vicious, unlucky, or gouty grandfather appears on the
books of that court in mysterious ways; his sins are pathologically
visited on his child's child in this time of testing strain.

In the happy rush towards useful health, of a convalescence undisturbed
by drawbacks, it is pleasant to think, as one lies mending, of the good
day to come when my friend, recovering from typhoid or smallpox, shall
send for his legal adviser and desire him as usual to bring suit against
the city for damages and loss of time.

A little girl coughed in my face a hideous breath of membraneous decay.
I felt at once a conviction of having been hit. Two days later I was
down with her malady. She herself and two more of her family owed their
disease to the overflow of a neighbor's cesspool, and to them--poor,