got a compartment to ourselves, for though several passengers opened
the door to come in, they shrank back as soon as they saw Montgomery's
ghastly face. He lay in a corner of the carriage, with his head done up
in flannel, procured at the hotel. He had the rugs and my great coat
over his legs, but he shivered despite them, and when he spoke at all,
except to say that he was feeling worse every minute, it was to talk of
men cut off in their prime and widows left destitute. At Mrs.
Montgomery's wish, I telegraphed from a station at which the train
stopped to the family doctor in Edinburgh, asking him to meet us at the
house. He did so; indeed, he was on the steps to help Montgomery up
them. We took an arm of the invalid apiece, and dragged him into the
library.
It was a fortunate thing that we went into the library, for the first
thing Montgomery saw on the table was the half inch of cio-root which he
thought had killed him. He had forgotten to take it.
In ten minutes he was all right. Just as we were sitting down to supper,
we heard a cat squalling outside. Montgomery flung a three-pound tin of
the cio-root at it.
EVERY MAN HIS OWN DOCTOR.
Statistics showing the number of persons who yearly meet their death in
our great cities by the fall of telegraph wires are published from time
to time. As our cities grow, and the need of telegraphic communication
is more generally felt, this danger will become even more conspicuous.
Persons who value their lives are earnestly advised not to walk under
telegraph wires.
Is it generally realized that every day at least one fatal accident
occurs in our streets? So many of these take place at crossings that we
would strongly urge the public never to venture across a busy street
until all the vehicles have passed.
We find prevalent among our readers an impression that country life is
comparatively safe. This mistake has cost Great Britain many lives. The
country is so full of hidden dangers that one may be said to risk his
health every time he ventures into it.
We feel it our duty to remind holiday-makers that when in the country
in the open air, they should never sit down. Many a man, aye, and woman
too, has been done to death by neglecting this simple precaution. The
recklessness of the public, indeed, in such matters is incomprehensible.
The day is hot, they see an inviting grassy bank, and down they sit.
Need we repeat that despite the sun (which is ever treacherous) they
should continue walking at a smart pace? Yes, bitter experience has
taught us that we must repeat such warnings.
When walking in the country holiday-makers should avoid over-heating
themselves. Nothing is so conducive to disease. We have no hesitation in
saying that nine-tenths of the colds that prove fatal are caught through
neglect of this simple rule.
Beware of walking on grass. Though it may be dry to the touch, damp is
ever present, and cold caught in this way is always difficult to cure.
Avoid high roads in the country. They are, for the most part,
unsheltered, and on hot days the sun beats upon them unmercifully. The
perspiration that ensues is the beginning of many a troublesome illness.
Country lanes are stuffy and unhealthy, owing to the sun not getting
free ingress into them. They should, therefore, be avoided by all who
value their health.
In a magazine we observe an article extolling the pleasures of walking
in a wood. That walking in a wood may be pleasant we do not deny, but
for our own part we avoid woods. More draughty places could not well be
imagined and many a person who has walked in a wood has had cause to
repent it for the rest of his life.
It is every doctor's experience that there is a large public which
breaks down in health simply because it does not take sufficient
exercise in the open air. Once more we would remind our readers that
every man, woman or child who does not spend at least two hours daily in
the open air is slowly committing suicide.
How pitiful it is to hear a business man say, as business men so often
say, "Really I cannot take a holiday this summer; my business ties me so
to my desk, and, besides, I am feeling quite well. No, I shall send my
wife and children to the seaside, and content myself with a
Saturday-to-Monday now and again." We solemnly warn all such foolish
persons that they are digging their own graves. Change is absolutely
essential to health.
Asked the other day why coughs were so prevalent in the autumn, we
replied without hesitation, "Because during the past month or two so
many persons have changed their beds." City people rush to the seaside
in their thousands, and here is the result. A change of beds is
dangerous to all, but perhaps chiefly to persons of middle age. We have
so often warned the public of this that we can only add now, "If they
continue to disregard our warning, their blood be on their own heads."
This we say not in anger, but in sorrow.
A case has come to our knowledge of a penny causing death. It had passed
through the hands of a person suffering from infectious fever into those
of a child, who got it as change from a shop. The child took the fever
and died in about a fortnight. We would not have mentioned this case had
we not known it to be but an instance of what is happening daily.
Infection is frequently spread by money, and we would strongly urge no
one to take change (especially coppers), from another without seeing it
first dipped in warm water. Who can tell where the penny he gets in
change from the newspaper-boy has come from?
If ladies, who are ever purchasing new clothes, were aware that disease
often lurks in these, they would be less anxious to enter dressmakers'
shops. The saleswoman who "fits" them may come daily from a home where
her sister lies sick of a fever, or the dress may have been made in some
East End den, where infection is rampant. Cases of the kind frequently
come to our knowledge, and we would warn the public against this danger
that is ever present among us.
Must we again enter a protest against insufficient clothing? We never
take a walk along any of our fashionable thoroughfares without seeing
scores of persons, especially ladies, insufficiently clad. The same
spectacle, alas! may be witnessed in the East End, but for a different
reason. Fashionable ladies have a horror of seeming stout, and to retain
a slim appearance they will suffer agonies of cold. The world would be
appalled if it knew how many of these women die before their fortieth
year.
We dress far too heavily. The fact is, that we would be a much healthier
people if we wore less clothing. Ladies especially wrap themselves up
too much, with the result that their blood does not circulate freely.
Coats, ulsters, and other wraps, cause far more colds than they prevent.
Why have our ladies not the smattering of scientific knowledge that
would tell them to vary the thickness of their clothing with the
weather? New garments, indeed, they do don for winter, but how many of
them put on extra flannels?
We are far too frightened of the weather, treating it as our enemy when
it is ready to be our friend. With the first appearance of frost we fly
to extra flannel, and thus dangerously overheat ourselves.
Though there has been a great improvement in this matter in recent
years, it would be idle to pretend that we are yet a cleanly nation. To
speak bluntly, we do not change our undergarments with sufficient
frequency. This may be owing to various reasons, but none of them is an
excuse. Frequent change of underclothing is a necessity for the
preservation of health, and woe to those who neglect this simple
precaution.
Owing to the carelessness of servants and others it is not going too far
to say that four times in five undergarments are put on in a state of
semi-dampness. What a fearful danger is here. We do not hesitate to say
that every time a person changes his linen he does it at his peril.
This is such an age of bustle that comparatively few persons take time
to digest their food. They swallow it, and run. Yet they complain of not
being in good health. The wonder rather is that they do not fall dead in
the street, as, indeed, many of them do.
How often have doctors been called in to patients whom they find
crouching by the fireside and complaining of indigestion! Too many
medical men pamper such patients, though it is their plain duty to tell
the truth. And what is the truth? Why, simply this, that after dinner
the patient is in the habit of spending his evening in an arm-chair,
when he ought to be out in the open air, walking off the effects of his
heavy meal.
Those who work hard ought to eat plentifully, or they will find that
they are burning the candle at both ends. Surely no science is required
to prove this. Work is, so to speak, a furnace, and the brighter the
fire the more coals it ought to be fed with, or it will go out. Yet we
are a people who let our systems go down by disregarding this most
elementary and obvious rule of health.
If doctors could afford to be outspoken, they would twenty times a day
tell patients that they are simply suffering from over-eating
themselves. Every foreigner who visits this country is struck by this
propensity of ours to eat too much.
Very heart-breaking are the statistics now to hand from America about
the increase in smoking. That this fatal habit is also growing in favor
in this country every man who uses his eyes must see. What will be the
end of it we shudder to think, but we warn those in high places that if
tobacco smoking is not checked, it will sap the very vitals of this
country. Why is it that nearly every young man one meets in the streets
is haggard and pale? No one will deny that it is due to tobacco. As for
the miserable wretch himself, his troubles will soon be over.
We have felt it our duty from time to time to protest against what is
known as the anti-tobacco campaign. We are, we believe, under the mark
in saying that nine doctors in every ten smoke, which is sufficient
disproof of the absurd theory that the medical profession, as a whole,
are against smoking. As a disinfectant, we are aware that tobacco has
saved many lives. In these days of wear and tear, it is specially
useful as a sedative; indeed, many times a day, as we pass pale young
men in the streets, whose pallor is obviously due to over-excitement
about their businesses, we have thought of stopping them, and ordering a
pipe as the medicine they chiefly require.
Even were it not a destroyer of health, smoking could be condemned for
the good and sufficient reason that it makes man selfish. It takes away
from his interest in conversation, gives him a liking for solitude, and
deprives the family circle of his presence.
Not only is smoking excellent for the health, but it makes the smoker a
better man. It ties him down more to the domestic circle, and loosens
his tongue. In short, it makes him less selfish.
No one will deny that smoking and drinking go together. The one provokes
a taste for the other, and many a man who has died a drunkard had
tobacco to thank for giving him the taste for drink.
Every one is aware that heavy smokers are seldom heavy drinkers. When
asked, as we often are, for a cure for the drink madness, we have never
any hesitation in advising the application of tobacco in larger
quantities.
Finally, smoking stupefies the intellect.
In conclusion, we would remind our readers that our deepest thinkers
have almost invariably been heavy smokers. Some of them have gone so far
as to say that they owe their intellects to their pipes.
The clerical profession is so poorly paid that we would not advise any
parent to send his son into it. Poverty means insufficiency in many
ways, and that means physical disease.
Not only is the medical profession overstocked (like all the others),
but medical work is terribly trying to the constitution. Doctors are a
short-lived race.
The law is such a sedentary calling, that parents who care for their
sons' health should advise them against it.
Most literary people die of starvation.
Trades are very trying to the young; indeed, every one of them has its
dangers. Painters die from blood poisoning, for instance, and masons
from the inclemency of the weather. The commercial life on 'Change is so
exciting that for a man without a specially strong heart to venture into
it is to court death.
There is, perhaps, no such enemy to health as want of occupation. We
would entreat all young men, therefore, whether of private means or not,
to attach themselves to some healthy calling.
GRETNA GREEN REVISITED.
The one bumpy street of Springfield, despite its sparse crop of grass,
presents to this day a depressed appearance, a relic of the time when it
doubled up under a weight of thundering chariots. At the
well-remembered, notorious Queen's Head I stood in the gathering
gloaming, watching the road run yellow, until the last draggled hen had
spluttered through the pools to roost, and the mean row of whitewashed,
shrunken houses across the way had sunk into the sloppy ground, as they
have been doing slowly for half a century, or were carried away in a
rush of rain. Soaking weeds hung in lifeless bunches over the hedges of
spears that line the roads from Gretna; on sodden Canobie Lea, where
Lochinvar's steed would to-day have had to wade through yielding slush,
dirty piles of congealed snow were still reluctant to be gone; and
gnarled tree trunks, equally with palings that would have come out of
the ground with a sloppy gluck, showed a dank and cheerless green.
Yesterday the rooks dinned the air, and the parish of Gretna witnessed
such a marrying and giving in marriage as might have flung it back fifty
years. Elsewhere such a solemn cawing round the pulpit on the tree tops
would denote a court of justice, but in the vicinity of Springfield, it
may be presumed, the thoughts of the very rooks run on matrimony.
A little while ago Willum Lang, a postman's empty letter-bag on his
back, and a glittering drop trembling from his nose, picked his way
through the puddles, his lips pursed into a portentous frown, and his
grey head bowed professionally in contemplation of a pair of
knock-knee'd but serviceable shanks. A noteworthy man Willum, son of
Simon, son of David, grandson by marriage of Joseph Paisley, all famous
"blacksmiths" of Gretna Green. For nigh a century Springfield has marked
time by the Langs, and still finds "In David Lang's days" as forcible as
"when Plancus was consul." Willum's predecessors in office reserved
themselves for carriage runaways, and would shake the lids from their
coffins if they knew that Willum had to marry the once despised
"pedestrians." "Even Elliot," David Lang would say, "could join couples
who came on foot," and that, of course, was very hard on the poor
pedestrian, for greater contempt no man ever had for rival than David
for Elliot, unless, indeed, it was Elliot's for David. But those were
the great clattering days, when there were four famous marrying shops:
the two rival inns of Springfield, that washed their hands of each other
across the street, Mr. Linton's aristocratic quarters at Gretna Hall,
and the toll-bar on the right side of the Sark. A gentleman who had
requisitioned the services of the toll-keeper many years ago recently
made a journey across the border to shake his fist at the bar, and no
one in Gretna Green can at all guess why. Far-seeing Murray, the
sometime priest of Gretna Hall, informed me, succeeded Beattie at the
toll-house in 1843, and mighty convenient friends in need they both
proved for the couples who dashed across the border with foaming fathers
at their coaches' wheels. The stone bridge flashed fire to rushing
hoofs, the exulting pursuers, knowing that a half-mile brae still barred
the way to Springfield, saw themselves tearing romantic maidens from
adventurers' arms, when Beattie's lamp gleamed in the night, the horses
stopped as if an invisible sword had cleft them in twain, the maid was
whisked like a bundle of stolen goods into the toll-bar, and her father
flung himself in at the door in time to be introduced to his son-in-law.
Oh, Beattie knew how to do his work expeditiously, and fat he waxed on
the proceeds. In his later days marrying became the passion of his life,
and he never saw a man and a maid together without creeping up behind
them and beginning the marriage service. In Springfield there still are
men and women who have fled from him for their celibacy, marriage in
Scotland being such an easy matter that you never know when they may not
have you. In joining couples for the mere pleasure of the thing, Simon
brought high fees into disrepute, and was no favorite with the rest of
the priesthood. That half-mile nearer the border, Jardine admits, gave
the toll-bar a big advantage, but for runaways who could risk another
ten minutes, Gretna Hall was the place to be married at.
Willum Lang's puckered face means business. He has been sent for by a
millworker from Langholm, who, having an hour to spare, thinks he may as
well drop in at the priest's and get spliced; or by an innocent visitor
wandering through the village in search of the mythical smithy; or by a
lawyer who shakes his finger threateningly at Willum (and might as well
have stayed at home with his mother). From the most distant shores
letters reach him regarding Gretna marriages, and if Willum dislikes
monotony he must be getting rather sick of the stereotyped beginning "I
think your charges very extortionate." The stereotyped ending "but the
sum you asked for is enclosed," is another matter. It is generally about
midnight that the rustics of the county rattle Willum's door off its
snib and, bending over his bed, tell him to arise and marry them. His
hand is crossed with silver coin, for gone are the bridegrooms whose
gold dribbled in a glittering cascade from fat purses to a horny palm;
and then, with a sleepy neighbor, a cold hearth, and a rattling cynic of
a window for witnesses, he does the deed. Elsewhere I have used these
words to describe the scene:--"The room in which the Gretna Green
marriages have been celebrated for many years is a large rude kitchen,
but dimly lighted by a small 'bole' window of lumpy glass that faces an
ill-fitting back door. The draught generated between the two cuts the
spot where the couples stand, and must prove a godsend to flushed and
flurried bridegrooms. A bed--wooden and solid, ornamented with divers
shaped and divers colored clothes dependent from its woodwork like linen
hung on a line to dry--fills a lordly space. The monster fireplace
retreats bashfully before it into the opposite wall, and a grimy cracked
ceiling looks on a bumpy stone floor, from which a cleanly man could eat
his porridge. One shabby wall is happily hid by the drawers in which
Lang keeps his books; and against the head of the bed an apoplectic Mrs.
Langtry in a blue dress and yellow stockings, reminding the public that
Simon Lang's teas are the best, shudders at her reflection in the
looking-glass that dangles opposite her from a string." The signboard
over a snuffy tavern that attempted to enter into rivalry with the
Queen's Head depicts the priest on his knees going through the church
marriage services, but the Langs have always kept their method of
performing the ceremony a secret between themselves and the interested
persons, and the artist in this case was doubtless drawing on his
imagination. The picture is discredited by the scene of the wedding
being made in a smithy, when it is notorious that the "blacksmith" has
cut the tobacco plug, and caught fish in the Solway, and worked at the
loom, the last, and the toll-bar, but never wielded Vulcan's hammer. The
popular term is thus a mystery, though a witness once explained, in a
trial, to Brougham, that Gretna marriages were a welding of heat. Now
the welding of heat is part of a blacksmith's functions.
It is not for Willum Lang to censure the Langholm millworkers, without
whose patronage he would be as a priest superannuated, but if they could
be got to remember whom they are married to, it would greatly relieve
his mind. When standing before him they are given to wabbling unsteadily
on their feet, and to taking his inquiry whether the maiden on their
right is goodly in their sight for an offer of another "mutchkin:" and
next morning they sometimes mistake somebody else's maiden for their
own. When one of the youth of the neighborhood takes to him a helpmate
at Springfield his friend often whiles away the time by courting
another, and when they return to Langholm things are sometimes a littled
mixed up. The priest, knowing what is expected of him, is generally able
when appealed to, to "assign to each bridegroom his own;" but one
shudders to think what complications may arise when Willum's eyes and
memory go. These weddings are, of course, as legal as though Lang were
Archbishop of Canterbury, but the clergymen shake their heads, and
sometimes--as indeed was the case even in the great days--a second
marriage by a minister is not thought amiss.
About the year 1826, the high road to Scotland ran away from
Springfield. Weeds soon afterwards sprouted in the street, and though
the place's reputation died hard, its back had been broken. Runaways
skurried by oblivious of its existence, and at a convenient point on the
new road shrewd John Linton dropped Gretna Hall. Springfield's
convenient situation had been its sole recommendation, and when it lost
that it was stranded. The first entry in the Langs' books dates back to
1771, when Joseph Paisley represented the priesthood, but the impetus to
Gretna marriages had been given by the passing of Lord Hardwicke's act,
a score of years before. Legend speaks of a Solway fisherman who taught
tobacconist Paisley the business. Prior to 1754, when the law put its
foot down on all unions not celebrated by ministers of the Church of
England, there had been no need to resort to Scotland, for the chaplains
of the fleet were anticipating the priests of Gretna Green, and doing a
roaring trade. Broadly speaking, it was as easy between the Reformation
and 1745 to get married in the one country as in the other. The Marriage
Act changed all that. It did a real injustice to non-members of the
Established Church, and only cured the disease in one place to let it
break out in another. Lord Hardwicke might have been a local member of
Parliament, pushing a bill through the House "for the promotion of
Larceny and Rowdyism at Gretna Green." For the greater part of a
century, there was a whirling of coaches and a clattering of horses
across the border, after which came marriage in England before a
registrar, and an amendment of the Scotch law that required residence
north of the Sark, on the part of one of the parties, for twenty-one
days before the ceremony took place. After that the romance of Gretna
Green was as a tale that was told. The latter half of the last century,
and the first twenty years of this, were thus the palmy days of
Springfield, for after Gretna Hall hung out its signboard, the Langs
were oftener seen at the "big house" than in the double-windowed parlor
of the Queen's Head.