sea were but healthful stimulants.  If I met with a tornado, it was only an agreeable variety; water-spouts and ice-islands gave me no manner of alarm; and I have seldom been more composed than when catching a whale.  In short, the ease with which I thus circumnavigated the globe, and conversed with all its varieties of inhabitants, expanded my benevolence; I found every place, and everybody in it, even to the Hottentots, vastly agreeable.  But, alas!  I was doomed to discover that this could not last for ever.  Though I was still curious, there were no longer curiosities; for the world is limited, and new countries, and new people, like every thing else, wax stale on acquaintance; even ghosts and hurricanes become at last familiar; and books grow old, like those who read them.

I was now at what sailors call a dead lift; being too old to build castles for the future, and too dissatisfied with the life I had led to look back on the past.  In this state of mind, I bought me a snuffbox; for, as I could not honestly recommend my disjointed self to any decent woman, it seemed a kind of duty in me to contract such habits as would effectually prevent my taking in the lady I had once thought of.  I set to, snuffing away till I made my nose sore, and lost my appetite.  I then threw my snuffbox into the fire, and took to cigars.  This change appeared to revive me.  For a short time I thought myself in Elysium, and wondered I had never tried them before.  Thou fragrant weed!  O, that I were a Dutch poet, I exclaimed, that I might render due honor to thy unspeakable virtues!  Ineffable tobacco!  Every puff seemed like oil poured upon troubled waters, and I felt an inexpressible calmness stealing over my frame; in truth, it seemed like a benevolent spirit reconciling my soul to my body.  But moderation, as I have before said, was never one of my virtues.  I walked my room, pouring out volumes like a moving glass-house.  My apartment was soon filled with smoke; I looked in the glass and hardly knew myself, my eyes peering at me, through the curling atmosphere, like those of a poodle.  I then retired to the opposite end, and surveyed the furniture; nothing retained its original form or position;—­the tables and chairs seemed to loom from the floor, and my grandfather’s picture to thrust forward its nose like a French-horn, while that of my grandmother, who was reckoned a beauty in her day, looked, in her hoop, like her husband’s wig-block stuck on a tub.  Whether this was a signal for the fiends within me to begin their operations, I know not; but from that day I began to be what is called nervous.  The uninterrupted health I had hitherto enjoyed now seemed the greatest curse that could have befallen me.  I had never had the usual itinerant distempers; it was very unlikely that I should always escape them; and the dread of their coming upon me in my advanced age made me perfectly miserable.  I scarcely dared to stir abroad; had sandbags put to my doors to keep