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 confess to have accidentally learned the value in my own experience of recovery—accidentally, because I practised it, not for cure but by way of resigning myself to a destiny I believed to be irretrievable—and in this very un-medical secret there may often be a cure for consumption. It is that the patient, after paying reasonable attention to the symptoms and treatment of his dsease, should ignore and out-happy it! With good spirits, occupation, and the disease taken little or no notice of, recovery is, at least, much more likely. This book will, perhaps do its best office, in showing how that indirect cure operated upon me.

Of topics which interested me, of excursions I took, etc. etc. during this year or two of convalescence, the chronicles are also here given. It forms altogether a volume of most digressive miscellanies, for which, of the general reader, indulgence should be asked. But it is it to my parish of, that, I must confess, I principally address and commend it.