In short, my dear sister assailed me with a pertinacity equal to the disease itself, so that I came, in a short time, to consider her as one of its worst symptoms.
To add to my woes, Dr. Tibbikens began to go over to her opinion, to talk of my digestive apparatus, and to drop hints in relation to bran bread and hickory ashes, which would decidedly have robbed him of my friendship, had I not at last found myself unable to do without him.
To make a long story short, I will omit a detailed history of my tribulations during the winter, and skip at once to the following spring; at the opening of which I found myself, young, rich, and independent as I was, the bond-slave and victim of a malady to which the woes of age and penury are as the sting of moschetoes to the teeth of raging tigers.
Reader, I have, in the course of this history, related to thee many miseries which it was my lot, on different occasions, to encounter, and some of them of a truly cruel and insupportable character. Could I, however, give thee a just conception of the ills I was now doomed to suffer, which, of a certainty, I cannot do, unless thou art at this moment the victim of a similar infliction, I am convinced thou wouldst agree with me, that I had now stumbled upon a grief that concentrated in itself all others of which human nature is capable.
Dost thou know what it is to have thy stomach stuffed, like an ostrich's, with old iron hoops and brickbats—or feeling as if it were? to have it now drowned in vinegar, now scorched as with hot potatoes? thy head filled with achings, dizziness, and streaks of lightning? thy heart transformed into the heels of a hornpipe-dancer, and plying thy ribs, lungs, and diaphragm with the energy of an artiste in the last agony?
If thou dost, then thou wilt know that bodily distress, of which the above miseries form but a small portion, is the least of the evils of dyspepsy—that its most horrible symptoms develop themselves in the mind. What care those devils, falsely called blue (for they are as black as midnight, or the bile which engenders them), for the youth, the wealth, the independence, the gentility of a man whose digestive apparatus is out of order? The less cause he may have in reality to be dissatisfied with his lot, the more cause they will find him; the greater and more legitimate his claims to be a happy man, the more fierce and determined their efforts to make him a miserable one.
The serenity of my mind gave way before the attacks of these monsters; sleeping and waking, by day and by night, they assailed me with equal pertinacity and fury. If I slept, it was only to be tormented by demon and caco-demon—to be ridden double by incubus and succuba, under whose bestriding limbs I felt like a Shetland pony carrying two elephants. My dreams, indeed, so varied and terrific were the images with which they afflicted me, I can compare to nothing but the horrors or last delirium of a toper. Hanging, drowning, and tumbling down church-steeples were the common and least frightful of the fancies that crowded my sleeping brain: now I was blown up in a steamboat, or run over by a railroad car; now I was sticking fast in a burning chimney, scorching and smothering, and now, head downwards, in a hollow tree, with a bear below snapping at my nose; now I was plastered up in a thick wall, with masons hard at work running the superstructure up higher, and now I was enclosed in a huge apple-dumpling, boiling in a pot over a hot fire. One while I was crushed by a boa constrictor; another, perishing by inches in the mouth of a Bengal tiger; and, again, I was in the hands of Dr. Tibbikens and his scientific coadjutors of the village, who were dissecting me alive. In short, there was no end to the torments I endured in slumber, and nothing could equal them except those that beset me while awake.
A miserable melancholy seized upon my spirits, in which those very qualifications which everybody envied me the possession of were regarded with disgust, as serving only the purpose of adding to my tortures. What cared I for youth, when it opened only a longer vista of living wretchedness? What to me was the wealth which I could not enjoy? which had been given me only to tantalize? And as for independence, the idea was a mockery; the servitude of a galley-slave was freedom, unlimited license, compared with my subjection to dyspepsy, and—for the truth must be confessed—the doctor; to whom I was at last obliged to submit, nolens volens.