The whole body of family physicians, and nurses of the body politic, have their hands full, and the multifarious practice sets at naught the popular idea of perfection, as a necessary consequence. It is gratifying to know, however, that in the absence of consistent and regular treatment, the popular remedy applied in its early stages is conducive to longevity and temperance—those who suffer severely from the fever here, and become exceedingly dry in consequence, are cured effectually by GOING AROUND THE HORN. Lying water-logged under the Tropics being rather a different thing from “getting up a breeze” at home, and being eminently suggestive of sobriety of thought, and of taking their cue from facts, and not from “Q Brandy” continually. Young gentlemen whose systems were here so relaxed, that nothing but taking a horn two or three times before dinner could impart to them sufficient energy to attend to out-of-door business, go around it, and give it a wide berth in the hot latitudes—shut their ears to all hints about the nervous system, and with a hardihood and self command, acquired within view of sharks and yellow fever, brave danger without stimulus, and fatigue without “having a gale.”
Under the tropics, too, young men, who have at home found no difficulty in getting three sheets in the wind, have rather an aerial difficulty in getting a flowing sail, and with plenty of steam on board, in the absence of propellers, decline all invitation to steam it, “to drive dull care away”—the trouble greatest, for the time, being to get away themselves. The boys who often declared in the hours of midnight that they were the particular individuals who feared no noise, and who would not go home till morning, wish themselves very quietly dozing there, and are perfectly subdued and indolent under the Equator in a three days’ calm, and do not insist upon “three more—and again,” so that they have an opportunity of candid inquiry and sober reflection, which may be serviceable—promotive of a thirst for cold water, and an abhorrence of dark brandy, in a “_sun_ny” clime. We do not see why something cannot be done for Temperance in this way, as well as not. People talk very disparagingly about “whipping the devil round the stump,” but so that the old scoundrel gets soundly thrashed at last, I never could see that the _modus operandi_ is so particularly important.