I had become, I felt a continual desire to walk. The weather was
unfavorable, but I managed to get several miles of exercise almost
daily. But this relief was limited to four or five hours at most, and
left the remainder of the day a weary weight upon my hands. The
aversion to reading had become such that some months elapsed before I
took up a book with any pleasure. Even the daily papers were more than
I could well fix my attention upon, except in the briefest and most
cursory way. Within a week, however, the sense of acute pain rapidly
diminished, but the irritability, impatience, and incapacity to do any
thing long remained unrelieved. The disordered liver became apparently
more disordered with the progress of time, producing such effects upon
the bowels as may with more fitness be told a physician than recorded
here. The tonsils of the throat were swollen, the throat itself
inflamed, while the chest was penetrated with what seemed like
pulsations of prickly heat. There was also a sense of fullness in the
muscles of the arms and legs which seemed to be permeated, if I may so
express it, with heated electricity. The general condition of the
nervous system will be sufficiently indicated by the statement that it
was between three or four months before I could hold a pen with any
degree of steadiness. Meantime, singular as it may seem, the
appearance of health and vigor had astonishingly increased. I had
gained more than twenty pounds in weight, partly, I suppose, the
result of leaving off opium and tobacco, and partly the consequence of
the insatiable appetite with which I was constantly followed. Within a
month after the close of the opium strife, I was repeatedly
congratulated upon my healthy, vigorous condition. Few men in the
entire city bore about them more of the appearance of perfect health,
and fewer still were probably in such a state of exhausted vitality.

During the time I was leaving off opium I had labored under the