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upon his soul, and more familiar to his imagination. The once cheerful countenance of the pitiable young man became by degrees overspread with gloom. The colour forsook his cheeks; and his perturbation and unhappiness were manifest, in spite of the air of unconcern which he strove to assume. The thought of death, which haunted him incessantly, daily aggravated his melancholy and misery; and his free opinions in regard to religion were transformed into the excess of piety and devotion.
The nearer he approached to the last period of his life, the greater became his uneasiness. His ever busy imagination acted most prejudicially upon his body; every feeling of indigestion, or obstruction of the blood; every change in his pulse, to which he paid incessant attention; every cold arising from checked perspiration, was thereby rendered much worse; and these most pernicious effects of the fancy soon converted what had previously been imaginary into real disease. Just about this time, a sudden change of weather laid up a great number of the inhabitants of T.'s native town with catarrh and rheumatism. He, too, was attacked by this complaint—a circumstance not at all surprising: nor will the reader, on considering all the facts that have been related, be at all astonished to learn that out of hundreds of patients, he was the only one who, in