Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 18.djvu/370

356

SIR,

F it had pleased God to restore me to any degree of health, I should have been setting out on Monday next to your house; but I find such a weekly decay, that has made it impossible for me to ride above five or six miles at farthest, and I always return the same day heartily tired. I have not an ounce of flesh or a dram of spirits left me: yet my greatest load is not my years but my infirmities. In England, before I was twenty, I got a cold which gave me a deafness that I could never clear myself of. Although it came but seldom, and lasted but a few days, yet my left ear has never been well since; but when the deafness comes on, I can hear with neither ear, except it be a woman with a treble, and a man with a counter tenor. This unqualifies me for any mixed conversation: and the fits of deafness increase; for I have now been troubled with it near seven weeks, and it is not yet lessened, which extremely adds to my mortification. I should not have been so particular in troubling you with my ailments, if they had not been too good an excuse for my inability to venture any where beyond the prospect of this town.

I am the more obliged to your great civilities, because I declare, without affectation, that it never lay in my power to deserve any one of them. I find by the conversation I have had with you, that you understand