Sketches New and Old by Mark Twain

from infallible remedies for my cold, I am satisfied that I would have

tried to rob the graveyard. Like most other people, I often feel mean,

and act accordingly; but until I took that medicine I had never reveled

in such supernatural depravity, and felt proud of it. At the end of two

days I was ready to go to doctoring again. I took a few more unfailing

remedies, and finally drove my cold from my head to my lungs.

I got to coughing incessantly, and my voice fell below zero; I conversed

in a thundering bass, two octaves below my natural tone; I could only

compass my regular nightly repose by coughing myself down to a state of

utter exhaustion, and then the moment I began to talk in my sleep, my

discordant voice woke me up again.

My case grew more and more serious every day. A Plain gin was

recommended; I took it. Then gin and molasses; I took that also. Then

gin and onions; I added the onions, and took all three. I detected no

particular result, however, except that I had acquired a breath like a

buzzard’s.

I found I had to travel for my health. I went to Lake Bigler with my

reportorial comrade, Wilson. It is gratifying to me to reflect that we

traveled in considerable style; we went in the Pioneer coach, and my

friend took all his baggage with him, consisting of two excellent silk

handkerchiefs and a daguerreotype of his grandmother. We sailed and

hunted and fished and danced all day, and I doctored my cough all night.

By managing in this way, I made out to improve every hour in the twenty-

four. But my disease continued to grow worse.

A sheet-bath was recommended. I had never refused a remedy yet, and it

seemed poor policy to commence then; therefore I determined to take a

sheet-bath, notwithstanding I had no idea what sort of arrangement it

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

been for young Wilson. When I went to bed, I put my mustard plaster–

which was a very gorgeous one, eighteen inches square–where I could

reach it when I was ready for it. But young Wilson got hungry in the

night, and here is food for the imagination.

After sojourning a week at Lake Bigler, I went to Steamboat Springs, and,

besides the steam-baths, I took a lot of the vilest medicines that were

ever concocted. They would have cured me, but I had to go back to

Virginia City, where, notwithstanding the variety of new remedies I

absorbed every day, I managed to aggravate my disease by carelessness and

undue exposure.

I finally concluded to visit San Francisco, and the, first day I got