The patient's imagination had been excited, his frame had undergone a great fatigue, and the fresh air, no less than the rain that had found its way to his person through all his wrappings, on the previous night, had produced a powerful impression upon his nervous system.

It was not strange that the morning found Jim unrefreshed, and his patient in a high, delirious fever.
"Now's the time," said Jim to himself, "when a feller wants some sort o' religion or a woman; an' I hain't got nothin' but a big dog an' a little boy, an' no doctor nearer 'n forty mile." Poor Jim! He did not know that the shock to which he had subjected the enfeebled lunatic was precisely what was needed to rouse every effort of nature to effect a cure.

He could not measure the influence of the subtle earth-currents that breathed over him.

He did not know that there was better medicine in the pure air, in the balsamic bed, in the broad stillness, in the nourishing food and the careful nursing, than in all the drugs of the world.

He did not know that, in order to reach the convalescence for which he so ardently longed, his patient must go down to the very basis of his life, and begin and build up anew; that in changing from an old and worn-out existence to a fresh and healthy one, there must come a point between the two conditions where there would seem to be no life, and where death would appear to be the only natural determination.