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was. It was administered at midnight, and the weather was very frosty.
My breast and back were bared, and a sheet (there appeared to be a
thousand yards of it) soaked in ice-water, was wound around me until I
resembled a swab for a Columbiad.
It is a cruel expedient. When the chilly rag touches one's warm flesh,
it makes him start with sudden violence, and gasp for breath just as men
do in the death-agony. It froze the marrow in my bones and stopped the
beating of my heart. I thought my time had come.
Young Wilson said the circumstance reminded him of an anecdote about a
negro who was being baptized, and who slipped from the parson's grasp,
and came near being drowned. He floundered around, though, and finally
rose up out of the water considerably strangled and furiously angry, and
started ashore at once, spouting water like a whale, and remarking, with
great asperity, that "one o' dese days some gen'l'man's nigger gwyne to
get killed wid jis' such damn foolishness as dis!"
Never take a sheet-bath-- never. Next to meeting a lady acquaintance who,
for reasons best known to herself, don't see you when she looks at you,
and don't know you when she does see you, it is the most uncomfortable
thing in the world.
But, as I was saying, when the sheet-bath failed to cure my cough,
a lady friend recommended the application of a mustard plaster to my
breast. I believe that would have cured me effectually, if it had not
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