theatre, or at somebody's party, if I pleased;—what could be better than all this? Was it better to hoe, to mow, to toil and moil amidst the accumulations of a barn-yard; to be the chamber-maid of two yoke of oxen and a dozen cows; to eat salt beef, and earn it with the sweat of my brow, and thereby take the tough morsel out of some wretch's mouth, into whose vocation I had thrust myself? Above all, was it better to have a fever, and die blaspheming, as I was like to do?
In this wretched plight, with a furnace in my heart, and another in my head, by the heat of which I was kept constantly at the boiling point, yet shivering at the bare idea of extruding so much as a finger into the icy atmosphere of the room, I kept my bed until breakfast-time, when Hollingsworth knocked at the door, and entered.
"Well, Coverdale," cried he, "you bid fair to make an admirable farmer! Don't you mean to get up to-day?"
"Neither to-day nor to-morrow," said I, hopelessly. "I doubt if I ever rise again!"
"What is the matter, now?" he asked.
I told him my piteous case, and besought him to send me back to town in a close carriage.
"No, no!" said Hollingsworth, with kindly seriousness. "If you are really sick, we must take care of you."
Accordingly, he built a fire in my chamber, and, having little else to do while the snow lay on the ground, established himself as my nurse. A doctor was sent for, who, being homœopathic, gave me as much medicine, in the course of a fortnight's attendance, as would have
