Under an oak, whose antique root peeps out
Upon the brook that brawls along this wood:
or to an encounter of his wits with the sage fooleries of a Touchstone;
or the love-sick ravings of an Orlando; or the nimble pleasantries and
caustic humours of a Rosalind.
But, to speak the truth, I don’t know whether I should not prefer at
this moment—to a lounge in the forest of Arden—a meditative ramble and
chat with the Wanderer in Wordsworth’s _Excursion_, which I spy leaning
against my old friend _The Vicar of Wakefield_, there, on the other
side of Shakspeare. How pleasant it would be, after toiling across the
bare wide common, baked with the scorching heat, to join that venerable
philosopher and retired packman just where the author himself meets
him by appointment, reposing his limbs on the cottage bench beside the
roofless hut of poor Margaret!
His eyes as if in drowsiness half shut,
The shadow of the breezy elms above
Dappling his face.
But the unceremonious porter is apparently unwilling to gratify me
so far, having, in his preparations for the sale, pushed a tall
half-tester bedstead right in front of my view of the chest of drawers
and bookcase.
This alteration has brought to light an old armchair among a crowd
of odd window-poles and bed-bottoms, a kind of bewilderment and
shyness in its wrinkled features, as if it hardly felt at home in this
nineteenth-century saleroom, rubbing shoulders, so to speak, with
pompous old sideboards, and gouty old sofas and stuff-bottomed chairs,
and wishing it were back to the earthen cottage floor again. From its
shape and the colour of its wood, it looks more than a hundred years
old. My Aunt S——, who was a paralytic, had just such a chair, which she
sat in for ten years before she died. It had belonged to her mother’s
mother; and she took great pride in averring that Burns—who, her own
mother told her, was a crony of her father’s—had many a time sat in
it. I think I see herself sitting in it at this moment, with her great
black piercing eyes, and hear her clever critical tongue wagging as of
old.
This ancient armchair, stuffed away amid the dust and lumber of the
saleroom, touches my feelings more nearly than any other object joined
together with hands. Its low, firm, but narrow seat, its solid curved
arms, its straight sloping back with three spars in the centre, recall
the tottering gait of silvery-haired grandfathers in knee-breeches and
‘rig-an’-fur’ stockings, and hale old grandmothers with white bordered
‘mutches’ or caps on their heads, and tartan napkins about their
stooping shoulders; and old-fashioned Scotch kitchens with eight-day
clocks, and wooden dressers, and clean-clayed roomy fireplaces with
big-bellied pots hanging from the links on the ‘swee’ or crane.
But what household god is this which is the subject of whispering
criticism behind me? Turning round, I observe two women, evidently
intending purchasers from their remarks, and not idle dreamers like
myself, moving away from a large chest to inspect some dishes they have
suddenly caught sight of on a side-table at the further end of the
room. This chest I have seen before, especially about the term-time,
mounted on the footboard of a cab beside the driver, while its ‘sonsie’
proprietress—unaccustomed as she is to ride in carriages—sits on the
edge of the cushioned seat inside, staring apologetically at the
foot-passengers on the pavement. It is the same kind of thing thrifty
housewives in the country used to keep their blankets in, before the
trunks and tin boxes came so much into vogue. It is painted an oak
colour, though to my mind it resembles more a musty gingerbread; and
it has a black line forming a square on each of its plain panels.
Instinctively I lift the lid and peep in. Its white wood is covered
with a wall-paper pattern of moss-roses. It has a ‘shuttle’ too, with
a little drawer underneath; the same as was in the chest I had when a
bachelor. I used to keep all my valuables in that little drawer, such
as love-letters. How those epistles accumulated! I remember I had to
press them down before the drawer would shut, when I happened to be
refreshing my memory with some of their pleasant sentiments. Peg’s
portrait used to lie here in a corner of this same charmed sepulchre.
If I were to tell my young readers how often I made an excuse to go
into my chest for something or other, and never withdrew my head
without taking a peep at Peg’s face, they would no doubt call me
spooney, though they know quite well they do the same thing themselves.
The bustling old porter, who kept hovering in my vicinity—a kind of
astonished interest looking out of his not unkindly gray eyes—here cut
short my amorous reminiscences by shutting down the lid of the chest,
and, apparently with a view to economise space—for odd customers were
beginning to drop in—lifting a cradle on to the top of it. The cradle
is one of the old-fashioned wooden sort, with good solid rockers, which
used to be seen in the houses of plain folks in my young days, and was
usually of some antiquity, being considered an heirloom, and descending
from parent to eldest son. I remember another cradle just like this
one, in our old home. It was painted a bluish-green colour inside, and
a loud mahogany colour outside, interspersed with numberless artificial
black knots, more like figures in the hangings, or wall-paper, than
the grains of wood. That cradle had rocked no end of generations of
my progenitors; and when baby visitors gave over showing their chubby
little red pudding faces at our house, my sister and I used to play at
‘shop’ and ‘church’ in it on wet days. On these occasions, though I
allowed her—as I no doubt thought became her good-for-nothing sex—the
full management of the shop, yet I always insisted on being the
clergyman, turning the cradle on its end, and preaching from under its
hood, which served as a canopy.
That oldest and ever newest tragedy which we must all, some time or
other, be witnesses of, or chief performers in, has been enacted in
this hollow little bed ere now. I see the worn and anxious mother
seated on a stool bending over the little sufferer in the cradle. She
has not had her clothes off for nearly a week, but she will not be
persuaded to lie down. She could never forgive herself if those glazed
little windows, so set-like now in their deep sockets, under the ashy
pale brow, were to be darkened for ever, and she not see the final
darkening. She wets continually the livid and senseless little lips,
and sighs as if her heart would burst, as she watches, in her own
words, ‘the sair, sair liftin’ o’ the wee breist, an’ the cauld, cauld
dew on the little face!’ The struggle will not last long now, and the
mother’s pent-up feelings will ere long get relief.
Whether desirous of diverting my thoughts from this harrowing scene, or
merely thinking it a pity that I should be exercising my mind over a
lot of lifeless old sticks, the porter, with a delicacy of insight that
I would hardly have credited him with, has brought two pictures, and
without a word has put them up against the backs of two mahogany chairs
in front of me. If that porter had been my friend the biggest half of
his natural lifetime—which, judging from the furrows on his lean face
and the whiteness of his scant locks, was already anything but a short
one—he could not have selected two works of art more pat to my taste or
my present mood; and I inwardly blessed him for his thoughtful trouble,
though I had a vague suspicion that there might be a gentle touch of
irony in his ministrations.
The largest picture, ‘Crossing the Sands,’ is a gloaming or twilight
subject, somewhere, I fancy, on the Ayrshire coast. Its features
are as familiar to me as the streets and houses in my native town.
It brings to mind the days of my childhood, when the old folks used
to hire a garret at the seaside for a few brief—for us youngsters
all too brief—days in the summer; and the lonely walks and talks of
later years, when the sun had gone down, and the newly awakened winds
blew all the stronger and fresher in our faces for their afternoon’s
slumber, and our voices mingled with the rhythmic murmur of the waves
as they broke at our feet.
The artist, I suppose, has named his picture from the dim outline of a
horse and cart, with two figures sitting in it, crossing the darkening
sands. The tide is far out, and has left long zigzag shallow pools of
water lying in the uneven places on the sands, into which the swift
vanishing day, through a break in the dark saffron clouds, is casting
wistful looks. The same pale reflection is glimmering faintly along
the wave-broken verge of the distant sea; while the denser flood,
where it stretches out to meet the gray skyline, wears something of a
sad melancholy in its cold blue depth. In comfortable contrast with
this lonesomeness, sitting among the deepening shadows on a dark clump
of moorland, or bent, on the left-hand corner of the picture, is the
dreamiest little hut, with the rarest blue smoke rising out of its
crazy chimney, and floating like a spirit among the dark grays and
purples sleeping on the hillsides.
The smaller upright picture is a street in Dieppe—the time, evening,
from the green tinge in the blue of the sky, and the roseate hue of
the low-lying clouds. It is just such an old French street as one
would delight in strolling through at that poetic hour, to feast one’s
eyes on the bewitching mixture of sunlight and shadow, reclining side
by side, or locked in loving embrace among the sombre reds, and rich
browns, and warm ochres on the quaint roofs and gables and walls; and
to note the leisurely figures of the picturesque women in white caps,
blue shortgowns, and red petticoats, chatting in the mellow sunlight
at the street corner, or moving along in the shadow under the eaves
of the overhanging gables; or the slow cart in the middle of the
street, its wheels resting on that streak of sunshine slanting from
the old gable at the corner; or the decrepit vegetable-woman at her
stand on the opposite side of that gutter, the fresh green colour of
her vegetables—all the fresher and greener against the daub or two of
bright red—wafting one’s thoughts away to cottage gardens and pleasant
orchards.
But I must not tarry any longer in this old French street, or, indeed,
in this musty old saleroom, which has thrown off its pensive and
meditative humour, and taken on a brisk, practical, and business-like
air. Already the auctioneer and his spruce clerk have arrived, and
the faces of the knots of people scattered up and down the floor are
looking with expectancy towards the little pulpit. It is no longer a
place for an idle dreamer like myself, and so I saunter out to the
street. The sudden transition from the shadow of the saleroom to the
bright white sunshine on the bustling city thoroughfare, together with
the sight of the refreshing water-cart, with a group of barelegged,
merry children prancing in its cooling spray, instantly dispel my
illusions; and in another moment I am as completely in the midst of the
living present as I was before in the dead past.
SURGICAL SCRAPS.
There is a curious instrument in the _armamentarium_ of the surgeon
called a probang, employed for removing foreign bodies which have
become fixed in the esophagus or gullet. It consists of a flexible
stem, at one end of which is an arrangement of catgut fibres, and at
the other end a small handle. By moving the handle slightly, these
threads of catgut—which are stretched all round and parallel to the
stem at its lower end—can be bent outwards in a radiating manner,
which gives the instrument the appearance of a chimney-sweep’s broom
in miniature. When a person is so unfortunate as to get a piece of
bone stuck in his throat beyond the reach of the surgeon’s hand, the
probang is sometimes found very useful. It can be passed down the
gullet, in a closed condition, beyond the obstruction, then opened
somewhat like an umbrella, and drawn upwards, carrying with it—if all
goes well—the foreign body. The passing of such an instrument is far
from being pleasant to the patient; but if it be done with ordinary
care and judgment, it will not be attended with any harm. Every one who
has known the misery attendant upon getting a good-sized piece of bone
impacted in the food-passage, will understand that when the operation
has proved successful, the patient is likely to consider the pleasure
of seeing the offending fragment caught in the meshes of the probang
cheaply purchased by the discomfort attendant upon the passage of the
instrument.
Another instrument employed for passing down the esophagus is used
for a different purpose. When the gullet has been severely burned
internally—as, for instance, from the accidental swallowing of
corrosive acids—after the ulcer produced has healed, there is a great
tendency to contraction in the scar, and consequent stricture of the
esophagus. This may threaten life, by tending to close the passage
altogether. To prevent this, instruments called bougies are passed
through the constriction from time to time. These bougies are simply
firm, smooth, slightly flexible rods with rounded ends, and are various
in size as regards their diameters. An instance of the passing of these
instruments being turned to account in a very curious way, occurred
some years ago in one of the London hospitals. A patient was suffering
from stricture of the esophagus, brought about in the manner above
described; and the tendency to contraction was in this case so great,
that it was only by the frequent passing of instruments that it could
be prevented from becoming to the last degree dangerous. Now, it was
impossible that the man could remain in the hospital permanently; it
was therefore decided to teach him to pass the instrument for himself.
He proved capable of this, after a certain amount of instruction;
and it then occurred to some one about the hospital that the daily
performance of this operation might be made the means by which the man
could earn a livelihood. Accordingly, the patient was advised to get a
bougie made as much as possible to resemble a sword. This he did; and
for a long time afterwards was to be seen about the streets of London
making money by what looked like the swallowing of a sword. In his
case there was really ‘no deception’ as regards the passing of a long
instrument down towards his stomach was concerned, the only deception
being that the instrument was not the weapon it represented. His
daily street performance thus served him in two ways—it supplied him
with food, and also kept open the passage by which that food could be
conveyed to his ‘inner man.’
The contraction about which we have spoken as taking place in scars
formed after burns of the gullet, and which is so dangerous there, also
occurs in burns on the surface of the body, and often leads to a good
deal of deformity. Burns, indeed, are a great source of trouble to
the surgeon in many ways. For instance, if a burn is very extensive,
there may be great difficulty in getting a cicatrice to form over the
whole of it. Cicatrisation only begins in the immediate neighbourhood
of living epidermis, and therefore a burn or ulcer must heal from the
circumference to the centre. But the further that the cicatricial
tissue extends from the margin of the burn, the more slowly and the
more imperfectly is it formed; and indeed it may fail altogether
to reach the centre. This difficulty has often been met by a small
operation called skin-grafting. A piece of sound skin about the size
of a split pea is pinched up—say, on the outside of the arm—and the
epidermis snipped off with a pair of curved scissors, the scissors just
going deep enough to cut slightly into the second layer of the skin
and draw a little blood. A special kind of scissors has been invented
for the purpose, that will only take up just the right amount of skin,
so that the operation is thus made even simpler still; and if it is
skilfully performed, it causes only very trifling pain. The little
fragment of skin thus separated is then placed gently, with its raw
surface downwards, on the unhealed surface of the burn. The same thing
is repeated again and again, till there are many grafts, if the burn
is a large one. Isinglass plaster, or some other similar material, is
employed to keep the grafts in position and preserve them from injury.
In about four days they should have taken root, and then the covering
can be removed. There is now a number of foci from which cicatrisation
can start; for, as before said, it will begin from where there is an
epidermal covering, and thence alone. After a time, a number of little
islands of scar tissue may be seen, which go on increasing until at
length they coalesce with one another, and also join that extending
from the margin of the burn. This is what happens if all goes well;
but, unfortunately, there is a very great tendency for a cicatrice
formed from grafts to break down and disappear, so that the result is
not by any means always so satisfactory as it at first promises to be.
Another trouble with burns is the great pain which they invariably
cause; and numberless are the applications which have been recommended
for its relief. The great essential in all such applications is
that they should completely exclude the air; for the very slightest
irritation to the surface of a burn will give rise to the most
excruciating pain. To prevent irritation and to keep the parts at rest
is indeed one of the surest ways of relieving pain, not only in the
case of burns, but in the treatment of other forms of injury, and also
in many kinds of disease. An instance of this is found in the method
adopted to relieve the pain in certain joint diseases. Those who have
visited the Children’s Hospital in Ormond Street, or indeed any other
hospital for children, may remember having noticed that at the foot of
many of the beds there was fixed a pulley, over which ran a cord with
a weight attached to the end of it. This cord, it may further have
been noticed, was fixed at the other end to a kind of stirrup which
depended from the patient’s foot. Thus the weight—which consisted of
a tin canister partly filled with shot—had the effect of keeping the
child’s leg on the stretch continuously. In fact, the little patient
looked very much as though he was lying on a kind of rack; and if the
visitor could have heard the surgeon order more shot to be poured into
the canister, saying that he thought the patient was able to bear more
weight, the command would have sounded very like that of a torturer,
rather than that of one whose object it was to relieve pain. But the
truth is that this rack is a very humane one indeed. It is the rack of
modern times, as distinguished from that of past ages; it is the rack
of the surgeon, and not that of the inquisitor. The cases in which
this apparatus is used are almost always instances of disease of the
hip or knee joint. The object of this arrangement of pulley and weight
is, by making traction on the foot and leg, to keep the lower of the
bones, which go to form the diseased joint, away from the upper, and so
avoid the excruciating pain caused by the carious or ulcerated surfaces
touching one another.
The benefit in such cases of having a weight drawing on the leg is
most marked at night, when the patient wishes to get to sleep. With
a good heavy weight, many a patient may sleep comfortably, who would
otherwise be in a most pitiable condition through the long watches of
the night. The position of such a person without any weight attached
would be this. Knowing from past experience what too often followed
on his dropping off to sleep, he would endeavour to keep himself from
doing so. This, however, would of course be impossible for long, and
at last the heavy eyelids would droop, the ward with its long rows of
beds would grow dimmer and dimmer, the breathing of the neighbouring
sleepers would sound fainter and yet more faint, until sight and
hearing failed him, and his long watching ended in sleep. But now
that he was no longer on his guard to keep his limb in a state of
perfect rest, the irritation of the diseased part would give rise to
spasmodic contraction of the neighbouring muscles. This contraction
of the muscles would bring the lower bone of the joint, with more or
less violence, against the upper; the two highly sensitive ulcerated
surfaces would touch, and with a shriek of agony, the child would
awake, quivering in every limb. And then, as the pain gradually grew
less, again the same terrible drowsiness would begin to oppress him;
and after another long spell of watching, he would fall asleep once
more, to be once more awakened in the same horrible manner as before.
But with a sufficient weight attached, the patient may go to sleep
confident of comparative ease; for the weight is too much for the
spasmodic action of the muscles to overcome, and the bony surfaces
therefore remain separated. And not only does the surgeon’s rack thus
save the patient from a terrible amount of pain, but, by allowing
him to get good rest of a night, it must increase enormously the
probability of ultimate recovery.
IN THE RHINE WOODS.
CUCKOO! CUCKOO!
I hear it again!
An echo of youth from its far sunny shore;
Through the dim distant years it resoundeth once more.
How mingled the feelings that rise with the strain—
The joy and the pain!
I hear it, but not
In the home of my childhood, the glorious and grand,
’Mid the wild woody glens of my own native land.
Ah! dear to me still is each far distant spot,
And present in thought.
I see them to-day!
The glory of Spring-time on valley and hill,
That struck to my heart with a rapturous thrill,
And friends in the sunshine of life’s early ray,
Young, happy, and gay.
All vanished and gone!
Could I see it indeed as in spirit I see,
The home of my youth would be joyless to me;
Like a bird’s empty nest when the tenant has flown,
Deserted and lone.
Soft, softly it rings!
O shades of the buried Past, slumber in peace!
O heart, bid thy sad, tender memories cease!
And welcome the Present, with all that it brings
Of beautiful things.
How often in youth
I have dreamed of this land of the oak and the vine,
This green, lovely land on the banks of the Rhine,
With longing prophetic, that one day in sooth
The dream should be truth.
Now gladly I rest
’Mid its scenes of enchantment with those that I love;
Warm hearts are around me, blue skies are above;
And though distant are some of the dearest and best,
I am thankful, and blest.
The years as they roll
Rob the cheek of its glow and the eyes of their light,
And much we have cherished is lost to the sight;
But one thing remains that they cannot control—
The youth of the Soul.
I. A. S.
* * * * *
Printed and Published by W. & R. CHAMBERS, 47 Paternoster Row, LONDON,
and 339 High Street, EDINBURGH.
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_All Rights Reserved._