“This improvement, or partial recovery, I attribute to the climate of Minnesota.  But not to this alone, other things have concurred.

“First, I had a naturally firm, enduring constitution, which had only given way under excessive burdens of labor, and had no vestige of hereditary disease upon it.

“Secondly, I had all my burdens thrown off, and a state of complete, uncaring rest.

“Thirdly, I was in such vigor as to be out in the open air, on horseback and otherwise, a good part of the time.  It does not follow, by any means, that one who is dying of hereditary consumption, or one who is too far gone to have any powers of endurance, or spring of recuperative energy left, will be recovered in the same way.  A great many go there to die, and some to be partially recovered and then die; for I knew two young men, so far recovered as to think themselves well, or nearly so, who by over-violent exertion brought on a recurrence of bleeding, and died. * * * The general opinion seemed to be that the result was attributable, in part, to the over tonic property of the atmosphere.  And I have known of very many remarkable cases of recovery there which had seemed to be hopeless.  One, of a gentleman who was carried there on a litter, and became a hearty, robust man.  Another, who told me that he coughed up bits of his lungs of the size of a walnut, was there seven or eight months after, a perfectly sound-looking, well-set man, with no cough at all.  I fell in with somebody every few days who had come there and been restored; and with multitudes of others, whose disease had been arrested so as to allow the prosecution of business, and whose lease of life, as they had no doubt, was much lengthened by their migration to that region of the country.  Of course it will be understood that a great many are sadly disappointed in going thither. * * *

“The peculiar benefit of the climate appears to be its dryness.  There is much rain in the summer months, as elsewhere, but it comes more generally in the night, and the days that follow brighten out in a fresh, tonic brilliancy, as dry, almost, as before.  The winter climate is intensely cold, and yet so dry and clear and still, for the most part, as to create no very great degree of suffering.  One who is properly dressed, finds the climate much more agreeable than the amphibious, half-fluid, half-solid, sloppy, gravelike chill of the East.  The snows are light—­a kind of snow-dew, that makes about an inch, or sometimes three, in a night.  Real snowstorms are rare; there was none the winter I spent there.  A little more snow, to make better sleighing, would have been an improvement.  As to rain in winter it is almost unknown.  There was not a drop of it the season I was there, from the latter part of October to the middle, or about the middle, of March, except a slight drizzle on Thanksgiving Day.  And there was not melting snow enough, for more than eight or ten days, to wet a deerskin moccasin, which many of the gentlemen wear all winter.”