out any of the jolting and jarring, which render fast traveling, at the present day, so exceedingly fatiguing.

I ought, perhaps, in concluding this letter, to apologize for the whole of it as a digression. I confess that it is a digression; for, when I sat down, I had no idea of reading you a long lecture on the Steam Engine. But it is too late to mend the mischief, now it is done. You must take it for what it is worth, and consign it to what fate you please. W.

RECOLLECTIONS OF THE HOSPITAL.

By the mass of mankind sickness and death are seldom seen, but when they come into the circle of their friends, or the bosom of their families. They come in darkness and mystery, they do their errand, and leave behind them associations of something terrible, but undefined. It is not strange that they, who witness disease only in those cases in which their deepest feelings are interested, should connect nothing but ideas of dread with every form in which Nature does her dreary work of destruction. And we find that all but a few, more hardy, or more accustomed to scenes of this kind, are most willing to shut their eyes, and wait in silence until the scythed chariot shall sweep them in their turn. I do not mean that they never allude to death and its attending circumstances, for there are times when we look with indifference on the future, and we often speak of the grave without thinking seriously upon it; but that, in those still moments when every word sinks into the heart, and calls up clearly its fearful image, the subject is turned from instinctively.

With these feelings it is no wonder that the asylum for the sick should be regarded as the most saddening object of contemplation. Its inmates have gathered, in anxious hope, from the homes where they have been languishing, to make one crowded family of suffering, to toss on the pillow which a stranger has spread, to be watched by eyes that have forgotten how to weep-perhaps to die, surrounded, indeed, by systematic kindness, but not by the unbought solicitude of affection.

But those whose duty it is to arrest or alleviate the progress of disease must and do soon learn to look on these things differently. Science does not, indeed, seal up the springs of human sympathy, whatever may be said by those who think outward weakness the only proof of feeling; but, in leading her disciple through paths of deep gloom and shadow, she asks him to lend his light to make them clear, instead of wasting his idle complaints at the foot of every cypress.

There are, however, several reasons which must render him less easily susceptible of emotion from the distress of his fellow creatures. Habit can do much to wear down the first acuteness of sensibility—that thrill at the anguish of another, which belongs more to the body than the mind. Can it do more? Is the philanthropist less compassionate and tender-hearted, after he has made himself familiar with misery, than when he first shuddered beneath the dew of the prisoner's dungeon?

It may be superfluous to ask such a question, yet nothing is more common than the notion, that he, who would make the relief of suffering his profession, must acquire indifference to it as his first qualification.

The knowledge that all were looking to him for calmness and selfpossession has given firmness to many a one, whose heart was sick with its own natural workings. A quiet interest is all the patient asks from his attendant. Less than this he cannot give ; more would be worse than useless. No one who has stood by the bed-side, in the darkened chamber and heavy atmosphere of sickness, with nothing but grief and despondency about and within him, can forget with what relief he turned to one unagitated witness, whom he might but a few days before have accused of apathy or unkindness.

Another reason may be found in his more exact estimate of the comparative amount of real suffering in any single individual. One who had just seen a convict crushed, limb after limb, upon the wheel, or strained until every fibre was tearing in succession from its hold, would think far less of the sufferings of a person sinking by gentle gradations into the repose of death; and on the same principle it cannot be expected that he, who has witnessed the awful struggles of protracted torture, which must occasionally meet his eye, should think as much of many cases, in themselves deserving the deepest compassion, as those who look at the few instances of disease, which come before them, without knowing how much more others are called to endure.

But that which, more than all the rest, enables the professional observer to look with composure on all that seems most terrible to others, is the custom of considering disease as a part of the organized system of natural operations, proceeding by laws as exact, and producing ef fects as determinate, as principles established for any different purpose. He has traced the progress of life from its rudiments in the embryo, to its strong maturity; he has watched the mysterious power, which works its own preservation by an unceasing series of changes, and when the same power, in obedience to the established rules of the same system, turns inward to disorganize what it has built up, he cannot but observe it with equal interest. There have been those so strongly possessed by this feeling, that, even when the hand of death has been upon them, they have watched with nice attention every step towards dissolution, until the film had dimmed their eyes, and the last lethargy deadened their perception. It is not singular then, that one who regards all the complaints to which we are subject, under an arrangement as regular as is applied to any class of objects or phenomena, should look with far different sensations on each particular instance of disease, from him, who, seeing them in single and distant examples, regards each as some frightful and unheard of anomaly.

It is, in a great measure, owing to this cause that we shall find the public receptacle for the sick by no means so fearful as we might at first imagine. We have, indeed, brought together a large amount of suffering, from many and different sources; but, in giving a name and a station to those sources, we bring them into relation with each other; and we show, not necessarily that the same affections have been relieved, but that they have, at least, been observed. In point of fact, we shall find as much resignation, if not cheerfulness, within the silent walls of a hospital, as in many a mansion devoted to less unfortunate inmates.

In the little sketches I shall give, I shall not indulge myself at all in fiction, with regard to the characters I describe. It would be easy to make more interesting patients than we often meet with, but I will not do it without giving warning. We,—that is, the young gentlemen who walk their daily round through the wards, are apt to indulge our partialities towards some of our more pleasing patients. There is one personage who never fails to draw the circle of morning visitants into a very narrow compass about her. I mean the Belle, for the time being, of the institution.

Adeline! beautiful Adeline! I hope that, before this time, her brown locks are falling upon a cheek as ruddy as Nature destined it to be. Her hands were not blanched into transparency, nor her waist girded into evanescence, but her look was so cheerful, as she sat by her bed-side, and her voice so sweet in its trembling tones, that the fiend of pestilence could not have harmed her.

When Adeline the Lovely laid down her diadem, it passed to the lofty temples of Ann the Buxom. No mortal man could have predicated, as he looked at her towering and ample figure, that she was afflicted with "nervous weakness." Yet, after dieting and phlebotomy, and a peck and a half of pills, she went from us with her crawlings and her creepings as unaltered, as if she had been a mass of rioting animalcules. She was not exactly beautiful, but she looked a body so straight in the eye, and told her preposterous symptoms with such an honest independence, at the same time with a pretty clear sense that there was something ridiculous about them, that, for almost a month, her empire was undisputed.

I am writing in my own character as a student of medicine, and I do not, therefore, feel as if I rendered myself liable to the accusation I may at other times deserve, of introducing circumstances which are impertinent, when addressed to the readers of idle effusions. This is certainly one of our besetting sins, and we are betrayed into it, because many people listen with interest to details of matters in which they are so much concerned, and of which they know so little. The appearance of one patient, whom I remember, was so very singular and unnatural, that I shall venture to mention it, though it might seem more fit for pages of a different character. In consequence of a dangerous accident she had been for a long time in the habit of having blood taken from her at short intervals, so that, in the course of a year or two, she had lost an almost unprecedented quantity. I had seen her in health, a rosy and hearty looking girl, even in a remarkable degree. I saw her but a little while before she was released from her sufferings, and never was contrast more striking. Her whole aspect was utterly bloodless, more so than I have ever seen in the lifeless body. The universal marble whiteness of her complexion, the sculptured stillness of her features, almost gave one the idea that some wandering spirit was inhabiting and half animating a wan form, which its own living principle had deserted; but the look of her dark eye, unclouded by all she had endured, and the motion of her wasted arms, which in her delirium she waved slowly from her, and then folded on her palpitating bosom, told us that life still lingered amidst the tardy footsteps of death.

So many of the patients who come before us, are afflicted with troublesome rather than dangerous complaints, that we may sometimes be excused for lighter feelings than those of compassion. I hope the dignitaries of Broad-street, will forgive me, if they look over this periodical, for saying that a smile is frequently excited by the children of Hibernia. They have such peculiar notions about the position of certain organs, and the nature of certain functions, that the trained student cannot sometimes but look with astonishment at their startling innovations. The gentle viscus which is commonly thought the seat of the affections, in their anatomy ranges about among its less interesting neighbors from the throat to the liver, and the stomach possesses absolute ubiquity.

A great Irishman was brought up into the operating theatre, the other morning, for the class to have a look at. According to his own story, he had had violent hands, or rather fists, laid on him, and two of his enthusiastic antagonists planting a blow on either cheek at the same time, it was a lamentable fact that his lower jaw had gone into three pieces; but I knocked down two of them, he added, as well as his misfortune would let him. I have been informed that the worthy magistrate who investigated the affair, observed that he had better have held his jaw, a circumstance, however, more amusing, than probable.

Honest John, with his saffron face and his rebellious digestives, has gone away now, and I may venture a stern-chaser at the little fellow, without fearing an indictment for a libel. Taken in connexion with his multitudinous envelopes, the little gentleman might have put the beam of the Hospital scales into perplexity, if there had been a hundred pounds at the other end of it. His voice was of that peculiar kind, which we sometimes find in those whom the tailor and the census recognize as men, but which nature has more generally appropriated to the softer sex. His face might be considered under two aspects; the state of quiescence and that of action. When undisturbed it was as innocent looking a polygon as ever flesh was sharpened into, but, when he spoke or smiled, it eddied into a perfect whirlpool of wrinkles, so that it seemed as if every feature were squirming with its own independent vitality. What could have put it into his head that he had stamina enough about him to do any thing with a potato after he had swallowed it, it would be hard to say, for the bog it grew in could not have sat heavier on his soul; but for that most intractable of delicacies, he once saw fit to relinquish the water-gruel he had been ordered. Of this he was solemnly accused before the morning tribunal. "No sir," said the dove-eyed offender. The fact was supported by witnesses. When a man fails in receiving credence for a simple denial, he is apt to have recourse to the "lie with a circumstance." But the lie with a circumstance may be refuted or involve contradiction, and it is a much safer method to prove by abstract reasoning that the thing is altogether improbable or impossible. The ingenious culprit thus overwhelmed by evidence, had recourse to this kind of demonstration. He pointed out with eloquence the folly and enormity of the offence, the utter abhorrence with which he should shrink from it, and reiterated his innocence of a sin so clear, that, had it been felony, he would have been hanged, and furnished all the morning papers a paragraph ending with "launched into eternity."

There was a poor girl, who, at the age of eighteen, has since been laid in her humble grave, whom her youth and sufferings made to all an object of pity. Her disease was known to be incurable, and, in the very dawn of her life, she had nothing to look forward to, but the weary interval of conflict before it had fretted away the threads that held her to a wretched existence. It seemed a mockery of hope and happiness, to see her gasping at the window in the bright mornings of spring. Throughout the wide prospect, the freshness of the early year was breathing over the fields, and the hills, and the waters, while she, with the arrow of death even then quivering in her heart, looked faintly out upon them, as if she thought the spirit, that was shedding softness on the air and verdure on forests, could once more give warmth to the springs of health that were freezing in their fountain. How different is the aspect of death at the different seasons. In summer, how fearful is the change that a few hours will leave upon the features, and how short must be the interval between the chamber of sickness and the dark stillness of the sepulchre. In autumn, the path to the tomb is strewed with fallen leaves, the grass of the church-yard is brown and withered, and their decay, at all times dreary, seems doubly desolate, as we pass away, and leave the dead to the sleep which will not wake when the earth above them is green, and the naked branches over.shadow them with foliage. In winter, the snow is cleared away, and the frozen clods hewn from the low arch of the vault, and, with the parting smile upon its unaltered features, we leave the form we have loved in the very clasp of the ungentle elements. The smile of death! how many speak of it, as if it were the farewell of an untroubled spirit to the body it was just leaving. To me, it always seemed the seal, which the destroyer had set in mockery on his victim; as if the wild bird should spread his bright wings over the prey that was reeking in his talons.

Nothing that comes before us is so distressing as the suffering of children. The poor little things are so transformed in every thing by its influence, that we can hardly recognize, in them, the beings that were lately playing about us. I saw two children, the other day, by the side of each other, one of them in full health, with the exception of a trifling complaint, and the other, panting upon her death-bed. But there was neither terror nor sadness in the wild eyes of the rosy girl ; and, the next morning, when the pillow of the sick child was vacant, she looked at it with a curious kind of expression, in which seriousness formed one of the smallest constituents. An infant, a few months old, was brought into the operating room, a short time since, to be cured of a very common deformity by the knife of the surgeon. The little creature looked up at the crowd of strange faces, and then at the glittering instruments, and smiled as well as it could with its ghastly features; it did seem like a sin to torture it, but it was necessary, and it was done. If that infant should live to maturity, I should love to ask what were its earliest recollections.

Few subjects are more painfully interesting than the physiognomy of sickness. Pain, in different degrees of intensity and duration, and many diseases which work, almost unfelt, at the yielding foundations of health, leave upon the countenance many shades of expression, which are evident to those accustomed to observe every indication of morbid