SOME noble physicians have tried the effect of drugs upon themselves in
order to advance their art; for this they have received Gold Medals, and
are alluded to as Benefactors of Mankind.
I have tried the effects of forty prescriptions upon My Person. With the
various combinations, patent medicines, and so forth, the total would, I
verily believe, reach eighty drugs.
Consequently, it is clear I ought to receive eighty gold medals. I am a
Benefactor eighty times multiplied; the incarnation of virtue; a sort of
Buddha, kiss my knees, ye slaves!
I have a complaisant feeling as I walk about that I have thus done more
good than any man living.
I am still very ill.
The curious things an invalid is gravely recommended to try! One day I
was sitting in that great cosmopolitan museum, the waiting-room at
Charing Cross station, wearily glancing from time to time at the clock,
and reckoning how long it would be before I could get home. There is
nothing so utterly tiring to the enfeebled as an interview with a London
physician. So there I sat, huddled of a heap, quite knocked up, and, I
suppose, must have coughed from time to time. By-and-by, a tall
gentleman came across the room and sat down beside me. "I hope I don't
intrude," said he, in American accents. "I was obliged to come and speak
to you--you look bad. I _hate_ to hear anybody cough." He put an
emphasis on hate, a long-drawn nasal _haate_, hissing it out with
unmeasured ferocity. "I _haate_ to hear anybody cough. Now I should like
to tell you how to cure it, if you don't mind."
"By all means--very interesting," I replied.
"I was bad at home, in the States," said he. "I was on my back four
years with a cough. I couldn't do anything--couldn't help myself; four
years, and I got down to eighty-seven pounds. That's a fact, I weighed
eighty-seven pounds."
"Very little," I said, looking him over; he was tall and
broad-shouldered, not very thick, a square-set man.
"I tried everything the doctors recommended--it was no use; they had to
give me up. At last a man cured me; and how do you think he did it?"
"Can't think--should much like to know."
"Crude petroleum," said the American. "That was it. Crude petroleum! You
take it just as it comes from the wells; not refined, mind. Just crude.
Ten drops on a bit of sugar three times a day, before meals. Taste it?
No, not to speak of; you don't mind it after a little while. I had in a
ten-gallon keg. I got well. I got up to two hundred and fifty pounds.
That's true. I got too fat, had to check it. But I take the drops still,
if I feel out of sorts. Guess I'm strong enough now. Been all over
Europe."
I looked at him again; certainly, he did appear strong enough.
"But you Britishers won't try anything, I suppose, from the States,
now."
I hastened to assure him I had no prejudice of that sort--if it would
cure me, it might come from anywhere.
"You begin with five drops," he said, solemnly. "Or three, if you like,
and work up to ten. It soon gets easy to take. You'll soon pick up. But
I doubt if you'll get a keg of the crude oil in this country; you'll
have to send over for it. I _haate_ to hear anybody cough"--and so we
parted.
He was so much in earnest, that if I had egged him on, I verily believe
he would have got the keg for me himself. It seemed laughable at the
time; but I don't laugh now. I almost think that good-natured American
was right; he certainly meant well.
Crude petroleum! Could anything be more nauseous? But probably it acts
as a kind of cod-liver oil. Sometimes I wish I had tried it. Like him,
I hate to hear anybody cough! Better take a ten-gallon keg of petroleum.
Alere's crude petroleum was the Goliath ale, and he had hardly begun to
approach the first hoop, when, as I tell you, he was heard to hum old
German songs; it was the volatile principle.
Songs about the Pope and the Sultan
But yet he's not a happy man,
He must obey the Alcoran,
He dares not touch one drop of wine,
I'm glad the Sultan's lot's not mine.
Songs about the rat that dwelt in the cellar, and fed on butter till he
raised a paunch that would have done credit to Luther; songs about a
King in Thule and the cup his mistress gave him, a beautiful old song
that, none like it--
He saw it fall, he watched it fill,
And sink deep, deep into the main;
Then sorrow o'er his eyelids fell,
He never drank a drop again.
Or his thought slipped back to his school-days, and beating the seat in
the summer-house with his hand for time, Alere ran on:--
Horum scorum suntivorum,
Harum scarum divo,
Tag-rag, merry derry, perriwig, and a hatband,
Hic hoc horum genitivo--
To be said in one breath.
Oh, my Ella--my blue bella,
A secula seculorum,
If I have luck, sir, she's my uxor,
O dies Benedictorum!
Or something about:
Sweet cowslips grace, the nominative case,
And She's of the feminine gender.
Days of Valpy the Vulture, eating the schoolboy's heart out, Eton Latin
grammar, accidence--do _not_ pause, traveller, if you see _his_ tomb!
"Play to me," said Amaryllis, and the Fleet-Street man put away his
pipe, and took up his flute; he breathed soft and low--an excellent
thing in a musician--delicious airs of Mozart chiefly.
The summer unfolded itself at their knees, the high buttercups of the
meadow came to the very door, the apple-bloom poured itself out before
them; music all of it, music in colour, in light, in flowers, in song of
happy birds. The soothing flute strung together the flow of their
thoughts, they were very silent, Amaryllis and Amadis Iden--almost hand
in hand--listening to his cunning lips.
He ceased, and they were still silent, listening to their own hearts.
The starlings flew by every few minutes to their nests in the thatch of
the old house, and out again to the meadow.
Alere showed how impossible it was to draw a bird in flight by the
starling's wings. His wings beat up and down so swiftly that the eye had
not time to follow them completely; they formed a burr--an indistinct
flutter; you are supposed to see the starling flying from you. The
lifted tips were depressed so quickly that the impression of them in the
raised position had not time to fade from the eye before a fresh
impression arrived exhibiting them depressed to their furthest extent;
you thus saw the wings in both positions, up and down, at once. A
capital letter X may roughly represent his idea; the upper part answers
to the wings lifted, the lower part to the wings down, and you see both
together. Further, in actual fact, you see the wings in innumerable
other positions between these two extremes; like the leaves of a book
opened with your thumb quickly--as they do in legerdemain--almost as you
see the spokes of a wheel run together as they revolve--a sort of burr.
To produce an image of a starling flying, you must draw all this.
The swift feathers are almost liquid; they leave a streak behind in the
air like a meteor.
Thus the genial Goliath ale renewed the very blood in Alere's veins.
Amaryllis saw too that the deadly paleness of Amadis Iden's
cheeks--absolute lack of blood--began to give way to the faintest
colour, little more than the delicate pink of the apple-bloom, though he
could take hardly a wine-glass of Goliath. If you threw a wine-glassful
of the Goliath on the hearth it blazed up the chimney in the most
lively manner. Fire in it--downright fire! That is the test.
Amadis could scarcely venture on a wine-glassful, yet a faint pink began
to steal into his face, and his white lips grew moist. He drank deeply
of another cup.
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