turnpike-men and country magistrates to his
way of thinking,—a mission in which this
Catholic missionary miserably failed. A
notorious Scotch Pagan has been equally
energetic and equally unsuccessful in the same
object.

CHIP.

ONE OF SIR HANS SLOANE'S PATIENTS.

IN The Universal Magazine of this month
of September, a hundred years ago, we find
a curious statement of the case of one of Sir
Hans Sloane's patients, contributed by some
friend of her family, the lady in question
being then deceased. It is an illustration of
the way in which persons deprived of one
sense, or of more senses than one, can receive
double help from senses that remain. This
lady was recovering from confluent smallpox,
when, after the last dose of a final
course of purgatives, she had pain and
convulsions, which, after a time were subdued,
but returned again at eleven o'clock on the
day following. The fits, which were
accompanied with violent contraction of the
muscles, a complete twisting of the head,
change of the features, and pulling of the
feet in at the instep, returned daily at about
the same hour. Remedies were tried, and
among them, the cold bath, but the daily
fits continued, and moreover the patient
became first blind, then deaf and dumb.
Also there was a spasmodic stricture in the
throat, so permanent that the sufferer lived
upon food chewed, or retained for some time
in the mouth, from which some of the juices
filtered down the throat, when nothing could
be taken by an ordinary act of swallowing.

While this lady lived in such affliction,
the privation of her powers of sight, hearing,
and speech was partly compensated
by an exaltation of her powers of touch and
smell. We have ourselves often seen a blind
friend join in a rubber of whist, sorting and
recognising his own cards easily by the touch,
and simply asking to be told what cards are
played by his companions. This lady could
tell by touch the colours of a piece of silk, or
of a flower, and could instantly detect the
presence of a stranger, as a dog can, by the
smell. She talked by the finger alphabet,
her friends using one of her hands to form
the letters on, instead of forming them
entirely with their own. A cousin who was
wearing an embroidered apron, asked her
what its colours were. She fingered the
embroidery attentively, and answered rightly.
The same lady had a ribbon on her head,
which was found by the touch to be not
red, but pink.

This cousin once went up into the sick
lady's chamber, and begged her to come
down and sit for a short time with the
family, no strangers being present. A strange
visitor had arrived in the meantime. Though
blind and deaf, the patient, at the moment
when the parlour door was opened, hurried
back, complaining bitterly that she had been
deceived. Her cousin cleared herself of the
suspicion of a trick, and asked how the
presence of a stranger could have been detected?
By the smell.

The sense of smell, however, was but
an imperfect helper. It was chiefly by
the exaltation of the sense of touch that
the lost senses were in part made good.
She distinguished her friends by the touch
of their hands. The general shape and size,
and the degree of warmth commonly sufficed
for recognition; but sometimes she would
also span the wrist and measure the fingers.
Once, a lady, who was an old friend, came in
from walking on a hot day, and, as usual,
gave her hand. The patient felt it for some
time, and seemed to be in doubt. Then,
after spanning the wrist, and measuring the
fingers, she said, in her way of finger-talking,
"It is Mrs. M., but she is warmer to-day
than ever I felt her before."

The same acuteness of the sense of touch
allowed this lady the solace of both needle
and pen. Her needlework was usually neat
and exact; and, after her death, many pieces
of it, especially one delicate pincushion, were
treasured in her family. Her writing was
not only neat and pretty—all the lines even,
and the letters placed at equal distances—but
by running a finger-tip over the words she
had written, she could detect even the
omission of a letter, and would write it accurately
over the place to which it belonged, marking
the omission with a little caret. She had
been sent, for change of air, to Bath, where
the convulsions were less frequent, and her
pains were less acute; but she never
recovered, in the least degree, voice, sight, or
hearing.

Experiments were often made by friends
who could not but think that she had some
glimmering perception of sight or sound to
help her. She allowed Sir Hans Sloane to
make what experiments and observations he
thought proper, and the issue of them was,
that he pronounced her to be absolutely deaf
and blind. But she was very sensitive of
being made a subject of experiment by her
acquaintance, and mental excitement
generally brought on an attack of her convulsions.
A clergyman found her, one evening, sitting
at work at a table, on which was a single
candle. He placed his hat between the
candle and her thread, in such a way as to
keep all the light off: she continued working,
ignorant of what was done; but
presently, raising her hand to her forehead, she
struck accidentally against the hat, and at
once felt that she was being suspected,
and became convulsed. Her family had
ample means of knowing the reality of her
affliction. Unconscious evidence was
constantly before them. Once she sat
tranquilly at work, facing the window, during