In this general way things went on for some time. The friends grew uneasy, as they should have done; and one or two of them, now that it was almost too late, spoke of another physician as counsel. My own readiness and more than readiness for this seemed to have the effect to quiet the patient, though it had the contrary effect on his friends. They appeared to construe my own liberality and the admixture of modesty and conscientiousness, which were conspicuous in my general behavior, into self-distrust, and hence began themselves to distrust me.
The patient's state of mind—for he was a man whose habits of thinking and feeling approximated very closely to those of the miser—more than once reminded me of some doggerel verses I have seen, perhaps in an old almanac, which are so pertinent in illustration of the point in my patient's character which these remarks are intended to expose, that I have ventured to insert them:—
"The miser Sherdi, on his sick-bed lying,
Affrighted, groaning, fainting, wheezing, dying,
Expecting every hour to lose his breath,
Enters a Dervise: 'Holy Father, say,
As life seems parting from this sinful clay,
What can preserve me from the jaws of death?'
"'Sacrifice, dear son, good joints of meat,—
Of lamb and mutton for the priest and poor.
Nay, shouldst thou from the Koran lines repeat,
Those lines might possibly thy health restore,'
"'Thank you, good father, you have said enough;
Your counsels have already given me ease.
Now as my sheep are all a great way off,
I'll quote holy our Koran, if you please.'"
At length my patient began, most evidently, to decline. There were various marks on him and in him, of approaching dissolution. When pressed, as I frequently was, to say definitely what the disease was—that is, to give it a name—under which Mr. —— labored, I only replied that he was suffering from premature old age. This always awakened surprise, and led to much and frequent inquiry how it was that a man of fifty-eight years could be dying of mere old age. My explanations, whenever attempted,—for sometimes in my pride of profession I wholly evaded them,—were usually, in substance like the following:—
"Mr. —— was feeble by inheritance. He never had that firmness of constitution which several of his brothers now possess. Then, too, he was precocious. His body and mind, both of them, came to maturity very early; which, as you know, always betokens premature decay. Men live about four times as long, when not cut short by disease, as they are in reaching maturity. As he was apparently mature at fourteen or fifteen, he might very naturally be expected to wear out at or before sixty.
"But then, in addition to this, he has all his lifetime labored too hard, not only from necessity, but from habit and choice. His ambition, it is well known, has been unlimited, except by his want of strength to accomplish. He has only ceased to labor hard when he had strength to labor no longer, or when it was so dark or so cold or so stormy as to prevent him.
"Then of late years he has had the care and anxiety which are almost inseparable from the work of bringing up a numerous family. It is indeed true that he has not been called to that severest of all possible trials pertaining to the family, the pain of seeing that family or any of its members go materially wrong. Still he has had a world of care; of its effects none are aware who have not been called to the same forms of experience.
"There is one thing more; Mr. —— has, at times, taken a good deal of medicine: not alcohol, in any of its forms, I admit, but substances which for the time were, in their effects, almost equally bad for him. He has used tea immoderately, and even tobacco. His constant smoking has been very injurious to his nervous system, and along with other things has, doubtless, greatly hurried on the wheels of life."