"For steel-medicines: steel-rosettes, and steel-chains.
"The precious stones which were formerly supplied from apothecaries' shops are even now good to be used outwardly.
"Bouquets, provided they are of silk, are probated medical plants, and by their perfume strengthen the brain.
"Shawls are healing to the breast, and (not a red thread, which is a superstition, but) a necklace with a medallion is, according to modern physicians, serviceable to diseased necks.
"With Peruvian bark much imposition has been practised, but the genuine is a frock _a la Peruvienne_.
"As, according to the modern surgery, all wounds are healed by mere covering, so, instead of the English taffeta plaster, mere taffeta on the body renders the same service.
"A new visiting-fan is, in violent swoons, indispensable; but whether a muff should be classed among emollient remedies, false _tours_ among setons, and a parasol among cooling medicines, and dress-trimmings under the head of trusses and bandages, this question one or three hundred cases cannot yet settle.
"We prefer to insist upon this, that a frizzling comb is a trepanning-instrument for headache, a repeating-watch for an intermittent fever, and a ball-dress is a panacea.
"And so, therefore, to speak jocosely, the ladies' tailor is an operator; his sew Lug-finger a _digitus medicus_;[46] his finger-hat [as we Germans call the thimble] a doctor's hat....
"Why did I forget thee, noble Beata? No _parure_ can cure thee; and if at some future day thy fair heart should grow sick, nothing would heal it but the best heart or death....
"Wonder not at my fire. I have just come from her and forget all faults of hers which a fortnight ago I still knew. Maidens, who are often sick, accustom themselves to wear a look of patient resignation which is _killingly beautiful_.[47] have underscored her favorite expression, but only from her own tongue can it flow in the sweetest dying cadence. To this patience she is trained not only by her everlasting headaches, but also by her father, who equally torments and loves her, and who, to do her a pleasure, would (according to the egotism of avarice) kill off a world. If the _soul_ of many persons (surely hers also) is too delicate and refined for this marshy earth, so, too, is the _frame_ of many, which can stand nothing harsher than humming-bird weather and vales of Tempe and Zephyrs. A tender body and a tender mind fret each other. Beata, like all of that crystallization, inclines a little to enthusiasm, sensibility, and poetry: but what sets her high up in my eyes is a sense of honor, a modest self-respect, which (according to my small experience) is an inheritance not of education, but of the kindliest destiny. This dignity secures, without prudish anxiety, female virtue. But if one must educate into the soul, nay preach into it, this womanly _point d'honneur_, ah, how easily is such a sermon overcome!