month, with strict injunctions to do nothing whatever all the while
that I was there. "Rest is what you require," said the doctor,
"perfect rest."

It seemed a delightful prospect. "This man evidently understands my
complaint," said I, and I pictured to myself a glorious time--a four
weeks' _dolce far niente_ with a dash of illness in it. Not too much
illness, but just illness enough--just sufficient to give it the
flavor of suffering and make it poetical. I should get up late, sip
chocolate, and have my breakfast in slippers and a dressing-gown. I
should lie out in the garden in a hammock and read sentimental novels
with a melancholy ending, until the books should fall from my listless
hand, and I should recline there, dreamily gazing into the deep blue
of the firmament, watching the fleecy clouds floating like
white-sailed ships across its depths, and listening to the joyous song
of the birds and the low rustling of the trees. Or, on becoming too
weak to go out of doors, I should sit propped up with pillows at the
open window of the ground-floor front, and look wasted and
interesting, so that all the pretty girls would sigh as they passed
by.

And twice a day I should go down in a Bath chair to the Colonnade to
drink the waters. Oh, those waters! I knew nothing about them then,
and was rather taken with the idea. "Drinking the waters" sounded
fashionable and Queen Anne-fied, and I thought I should like them.
But, ugh! after the first three or four mornings! Sam Weller's
description of them as "having a taste of warm flat-irons" conveys
only a faint idea of their hideous nauseousness. If anything could
make a sick man get well quickly, it would be the knowledge that he
must drink a glassful of them every day until he was recovered. I