It is a good thing, perhaps, to write for the amusement of the public, but it is a far higher and nobler thing to write for their instruction – their profit – their actual benefit. It is the only object of this article.
If it helps to restore the health of one sufferer among my race, to bring back to his dead heart again the quick, generous impulses of other days, I shall be rewarded for my work.
Having led a pure and blameless life, I believe that no man who knows me will reject the suggestions I am about to make, out of fear that I am trying to deceive him.
Let the public do itself the honor to read my experience in curing a cold and then follow in my footsteps.
When the White House was burned in Virginia, I lost my home, my happiness, my constitution and my trunk.
The loss of the two first named articles was a matter of no great consequence, since a home without a mother or a sister, or a distant young female relative in it, who remind you that there are those who think about you and care for you, is easily obtained.
And I did not care about the loss of my happiness. I was not a poet, and it could not be possible that melancholy would stay with me long.
But to lose a good constitution and a better trunk were serious misfortunes.
On the day of the fire, my constitution succumbed to a severe cold.
The first time I began to sneeze, a friend told me to go and bathe my feet in hot water and go to bed.
I did so.
Shortly afterward, another friend advised me to get up and take a cold shower-bath. I did that also.
Within the hour, another friend told me that I had to “feed a cold and starve a fever.”
I had both.
I decided to fill myself up for the cold, and then let the fever starve a while.
I ate pretty heartily; once I went to a stranger who had just opened his restaurant that morning. He waited near me in respectful silence until I had finished feeding my cold, when he asked if the people in Virginia were much afflicted with colds?
I told him I thought they were.
He then went out and took in his sign.[1]
I started down toward the office, and on the way met another friend, who told me that a quart of salt water, taken warm, would cure a cold in no time.
