A sick person does so enjoy hearing good news:--for instance, of a love
and courtship, while in progress to a good ending. If you tell him only
when the marriage takes place, he loses half the pleasure, which God
knows he has little enough of; and ten to one but you have told him of
some love-making with a bad ending.
A sick person also intensely enjoys hearing of any _material_ good, any
positive or practical success of the right. He has so much of books and
fiction, of principles, and precepts, and theories; do, instead of
advising him with advice he has heard at least fifty times before, tell
him of one benevolent act which has really succeeded practically,--it is
like a day's health to him.[32]
You have no idea what the craving of sick with undiminished power of
thinking, but little power of doing, is to hear of good practical
action, when they can no longer partake in it.
Do observe these things with the sick. Do remember how their life is to
them disappointed and incomplete. You see them lying there with
miserable disappointments, from which they can have no escape but death,
and you can't remember to tell them of what would give them so much
pleasure, or at least an hour's variety.
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