FORTIETH, OR 2d EPIPHANY, SECTION.
An attack of amaurosis, to all appearances, in addition to my other maladies, is threatening me; for sparks, and specks, and spider-webs dance for hours about my eyes; and these (according to Plempins and Chevalier Zimmerman) are premonitory symptoms of the said disease. Squinting (says Richter, the cataract-operator, not the patient--in his Surgical Science. B. III p. 426) is an unmistakable forerunner of amaurosis. How very much I squint, every one can see, because I always look and aim at everything to the right and left at once. Now when I actually become as stone-blind as a mole, then it is all up with my bit of biographical writing....
FORTY-FIRST, OR 3d EPIPHANY, SECTION.
I have a couple of fevers at once, which with other more fortunate persons cannot generally bear each other's company. The three-days' fever, the quartan-fever, and then an Autumnal or Spring fever in general. Meanwhile I will, so long as I am yet uncoffined, write something every Sunday for the public to read, two or three lines at least, if my plan should succeed. Even my style suffers terribly; here are the two verbs rhyming....
FORTY-SECOND, OR 4th EPIPHANY, SECTION.
Ye pleasant biographical Sundays! I shall never spend another. In addition to the ills which I have already mentioned, there is a live lizard has taken up his abode in my stomach, whose spawn I must have swallowed in an unfortunate draught last summer....
FORTY-THIRD, OR 5th AND 6th EPIPHANY, SECTION.
Of cherry-stones sprouting in the stomach as well as peas in the ear, there are examples. But I have never yet read of an instance, in which the seed of gooseberries, which we usually swallow with the fruit, has germinated in the bowels, when these by constipation had become the forcing vat of the aforesaid vegetable. Good heavens! what will be the final upshot of my malady, whose invisible claw seizes, cramps, distends, rends asunder my nerves and my vitals...!
FORTY-FOURTH, OR SEPTUAGESIMA, SECTION.
If there is a malady which is a compilation of all maladies, all chapters of pathology at once, nobody has it but I. Apoplexy--hectic--cramp in the stomach or a lizard--three kinds of fever--polypus in the heart--sprouting gooseberry bushes:--such are the few visible constituents and ingredients which I have thus far been able to announce of my malady; a judicious deeper section of my poor body will, when both classes of constituents shall have laid it low, add to these the invisible ones also....