<h2>CHAPTER I.</h2>
<p class="gutsumm">Three invalids.—Sufferings of George and
Harris.—A victim to one hundred and seven fatal
maladies.—Useful prescriptions.—Cure for liver
complaint in children.—We agree that we are overworked, and
need rest.—A week on the rolling deep?—George
suggests the River.—Montmorency lodges an
objection.—Original motion carried by majority of three to
one.</p>
<p>There were four of us—George, and William Samuel Harris,
and myself, and Montmorency. We were sitting in my room,
smoking, and talking about how bad we were—bad from a
medical point of view I mean, of course.</p>
<p>We were all feeling seedy, and we were getting quite nervous
about it. Harris said he felt such extraordinary fits of
giddiness come over him at times, that he hardly knew what he was
doing; and then George said that <i>he</i> had fits of giddiness
too, and hardly knew what <i>he</i> was doing. With me, it
was my liver that was out of order. I knew it was my liver
that was out of order, because I had just been reading a patent
liver-pill circular, in which were detailed the various symptoms
by which a man could tell when his liver was out of order.
I had them all.</p>
<p>It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent
medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion
that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt
with in its most virulent form. The diagnosis seems in
every case to correspond exactly with all the sensations that I
have ever felt.</p>
<p><SPAN href="images/p2b.jpg">
<ANTIMG class='floatleft' alt= "Man reading book" title= "Man reading book" src="images/p2s.jpg" /></SPAN>I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the
treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a
touch—hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book,
and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I
idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases,
generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged
into—some fearful, devastating scourge, I know—and,
before I had glanced half down the list of “premonitory
symptoms,” it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got
it.</p>
<p>I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the
listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I
came to typhoid fever—read the symptoms—discovered
that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without
knowing it—wondered what else I had got; turned up St.
Vitus’s Dance—found, as I expected, that I had that
too,—began to get interested in my case, and determined to
sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically—read
up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the
acute stage would commence in about another fortnight.
Bright’s disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a
modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live
for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and
diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded
conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only
malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s
knee.</p>
<p>I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to
be a sort of slight. Why hadn’t I got
housemaid’s knee? Why this invidious
reservation? After a while, however, less grasping feelings
prevailed. I reflected that I had every other known malady
in the pharmacology, and I grew less selfish, and determined to
do without housemaid’s knee. Gout, in its most
malignant stage, it would appear, had seized me without my being
aware of it; and zymosis I had evidently been suffering with from
boyhood. There were no more diseases after zymosis, so I
concluded there was nothing else the matter with me.</p>
<p>I sat and pondered. I thought what an interesting case I
must be from a medical point of view, what an acquisition I
should be to a class! Students would have no need to
“walk the hospitals,” if they had me. I was a
hospital in myself. All they need do would be to walk round
me, and, after that, take their diploma.</p>
<p>Then I wondered how long I had to live. I tried to
examine myself. I felt my pulse. I could not at first
feel any pulse at all. Then, all of a sudden, it seemed to
start off. I pulled out my watch and timed it. I made
it a hundred and forty-seven to the minute. I tried to feel
my heart. I could not feel my heart. It had stopped
beating. I have since been induced to come to the opinion
that it must have been there all the time, and must have been
beating, but I cannot account for it. I patted myself all
over my front, from what I call my waist up to my head, and I
went a bit round each side, and a little way up the back.
But I could not feel or hear anything. I tried to look at
my tongue. I stuck it out as far as ever it would go, and I
shut one eye, and tried to examine it with the other. I
could only see the tip, and the only thing that I could gain from
that was to feel more certain than before that I had scarlet
fever.</p>
<p><SPAN href="images/p5b.jpg">
<ANTIMG class='floatright' alt= "Man with walking stick" title= "Man with walking stick" src="images/p5s.jpg" /></SPAN>I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy
man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.</p>
<p>I went to my medical man. He is an old chum of mine, and
feels my pulse, and looks at my tongue, and talks about the
weather, all for nothing, when I fancy I’m ill; so I
thought I would do him a good turn by going to him now.
“What a doctor wants,” I said, “is
practice. He shall have me. He will get more practice
out of me than out of seventeen hundred of your ordinary,
commonplace patients, with only one or two diseases
each.” So I went straight up and saw him, and he
said:</p>
<p>“Well, what’s the matter with you?”</p>
<p>I said:</p>
<p>“I will not take up your time, dear boy, with telling
you what is the matter with me. Life is brief, and you
might pass away before I had finished. But I will tell you
what is <i>not</i> the matter with me. I have not got
housemaid’s knee. Why I have not got
housemaid’s knee, I cannot tell you; but the fact remains
that I have not got it. Everything else, however, I
<i>have</i> got.”</p>
<p>And I told him how I came to discover it all.</p>
<p>Then he opened me and looked down me, and clutched hold of my
wrist, and then he hit me over the chest when I wasn’t
expecting it—a cowardly thing to do, I call it—and
immediately afterwards butted me with the side of his head.
After that, he sat down and wrote out a prescription, and folded
it up and gave it me, and I put it in my pocket and went out.</p>
<p>I did not open it. I took it to the nearest
chemist’s, and handed it in. The man read it, and
then handed it back.</p>
<p>He said he didn’t keep it.</p>
<p>I said:</p>
<p>“You are a chemist?”</p>
<p>He said:</p>
<p>“I am a chemist. If I was a co-operative stores
and family hotel combined, I might be able to oblige you.
Being only a chemist hampers me.”</p>
<p>I read the prescription. It ran:</p>
<blockquote><p>“1 lb. beefsteak, with<br/>
1 pt. bitter beer</p>
<p style="text-align: right">every 6 hours.</p>
<p>1 ten-mile walk every morning.</p>
<p>1 bed at 11 sharp every night.</p>
<p>And don’t stuff up your head with things you don’t
understand.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p> </p>
<p>I followed the directions, with the happy
result—speaking for myself—that my life was
preserved, and is still going on.</p>
<p>In the present instance, going back to the liver-pill
circular, I had the symptoms, beyond all mistake, the chief among
them being “a general disinclination to work of any
kind.”</p>
<p>What I suffer in that way no tongue can tell. From my
earliest infancy I have been a martyr to it. As a boy, the
disease hardly ever left me for a day. They did not know,
then, that it was my liver. Medical science was in a far
less advanced state than now, and they used to put it down to
laziness.</p>
<p>“Why, you skulking little devil, you,” they would
say, “get up and do something for your living, can’t
you?”—not knowing, of course, that I was ill.</p>
<p>And they didn’t give me pills; they gave me clumps on
the side of the head. And, strange as it may appear, those
clumps on the head often cured me—for the time being.
I have known one clump on the head have more effect upon my
liver, and make me feel more anxious to go straight away then and
there, and do what was wanted to be done, without further loss of
time, than a whole box of pills does now.</p>
<p>You know, it often is so—those simple, old-fashioned
remedies are sometimes more efficacious than all the dispensary
stuff.</p>
<p>We sat there for half-an-hour, describing to each other our
maladies. I explained to George and William Harris how I
felt when I got up in the morning, and William Harris told us how
he felt when he went to bed; and George stood on the hearth-rug,
and gave us a clever and powerful piece of acting, illustrative
of how he felt in the night.</p>
<p>George <i>fancies</i> he is ill; but there’s never
anything really the matter with him, you know.</p>
<p>At this point, Mrs. Poppets knocked at the door to know if we
were ready for supper. We smiled sadly at one another, and
said we supposed we had better try to swallow a bit. Harris
said a little something in one’s stomach often kept the
disease in check; and Mrs. Poppets brought the tray in, and we
drew up to the table, and toyed with a little steak and onions,
and some rhubarb tart.</p>
<p>I must have been very weak at the time; because I know, after
the first half-hour or so, I seemed to take no interest whatever
in my food—an unusual thing for me—and I didn’t
want any cheese.</p>
<p>This duty done, we refilled our glasses, lit our pipes, and
resumed the discussion upon our state of health. What it
was that was actually the matter with us, we none of us could be
sure of; but the unanimous opinion was that it—whatever it
was—had been brought on by overwork.</p>
<p>“What we want is rest,” said Harris.</p>
<p>“Rest and a complete change,” said George.
“The overstrain upon our brains has produced a general
depression throughout the system. Change of scene, and
absence of the necessity for thought, will restore the mental
equilibrium.”</p>
<p>George has a cousin, who is usually described in the
charge-sheet as a medical student, so that he naturally has a
somewhat family-physicianary way of putting things.</p>
<p>I agreed with George, and suggested that we should seek out
some retired and old-world spot, far from the madding crowd, and
dream away a sunny week among its drowsy lanes—some
half-forgotten nook, hidden away by the fairies, out of reach of
the noisy world—some quaint-perched eyrie on the cliffs of
Time, from whence the surging waves of the nineteenth century
would sound far-off and faint.</p>
<p>Harris said he thought it would be humpy. He said he
knew the sort of place I meant; where everybody went to bed at
eight o’clock, and you couldn’t get a <i>Referee</i>
for love or money, and had to walk ten miles to get your
baccy.</p>
<p>“No,” said Harris, “if you want rest and
change, you can’t beat a sea trip.”</p>
<p>I objected to the sea trip strongly. A sea trip does you
good when you are going to have a couple of months of it, but,
for a week, it is wicked.</p>
<p>You start on Monday with the idea implanted in your bosom that
you are going to enjoy yourself. You wave an airy adieu to
the boys on shore, light your biggest pipe, and swagger about the
deck as if you were Captain Cook, Sir Francis Drake, and
Christopher Columbus all rolled into one. On Tuesday, you
wish you hadn’t come. On Wednesday, Thursday, and
Friday, you wish you were dead. On Saturday, you are able
to swallow a little beef tea, and to sit up on deck, and answer
with a wan, sweet smile when kind-hearted people ask you how you
feel now. On Sunday, you begin to walk about again, and
take solid food. And on Monday morning, as, with your bag
and umbrella in your hand, you stand by the gunwale, waiting to
step ashore, you begin to thoroughly like it.</p>
<p>I remember my brother-in-law going for a short sea trip once,
for the benefit of his health. He took a return berth from
London to Liverpool; and when he got to Liverpool, the only thing
he was anxious about was to sell that return ticket.</p>
<p>It was offered round the town at a tremendous reduction, so I
am told; and was eventually sold for eighteenpence to a
bilious-looking youth who had just been advised by his medical
men to go to the sea-side, and take exercise.</p>
<p>“Sea-side!” said my brother-in-law, pressing the
ticket affectionately into his hand; “why, you’ll
have enough to last you a lifetime; and as for exercise! why,
you’ll get more exercise, sitting down on that ship, than
you would turning somersaults on dry land.”</p>
<p>He himself—my brother-in-law—came back by
train. He said the North-Western Railway was healthy enough
for him.</p>
<p>Another fellow I knew went for a week’s voyage round the
coast, and, before they started, the steward came to him to ask
whether he would pay for each meal as he had it, or arrange
beforehand for the whole series.</p>
<p>The steward recommended the latter course, as it would come so
much cheaper. He said they would do him for the whole week
at two pounds five. He said for breakfast there would be
fish, followed by a grill. Lunch was at one, and consisted
of four courses. Dinner at six—soup, fish, entree,
joint, poultry, salad, sweets, cheese, and dessert. And a
light meat supper at ten.</p>
<p>My friend thought he would close on the two-pound-five job (he
is a hearty eater), and did so.</p>
<p>Lunch came just as they were off Sheerness. He
didn’t feel so hungry as he thought he should, and so
contented himself with a bit of boiled beef, and some
strawberries and cream. He pondered a good deal during the
afternoon, and at one time it seemed to him that he had been
eating nothing but boiled beef for weeks, and at other times it
seemed that he must have been living on strawberries and cream
for years.</p>
<p>Neither the beef nor the strawberries and cream seemed happy,
either—seemed discontented like.</p>
<p>At six, they came and told him dinner was ready. The
announcement aroused no enthusiasm within him, but he felt that
there was some of that two-pound-five to be worked off, and he
held on to ropes and things and went down. A pleasant odour
of onions and hot ham, mingled with fried fish and greens,
greeted him at the bottom of the ladder; and then the steward
came up with an oily smile, and said:</p>
<p>“What can I get you, sir?”</p>
<p><SPAN href="images/p13b.jpg">
<ANTIMG class='floatright' alt= "Man feeling ill" title= "Man feeling ill" src="images/p13s.jpg" /></SPAN>“Get me out of this,” was the feeble reply.</p>
<p>And they ran him up quick, and propped him up, over to
leeward, and left him.</p>
<p>For the next four days he lived a simple and blameless life on
thin captain’s biscuits (I mean that the biscuits were
thin, not the captain) and soda-water; but, towards Saturday, he
got uppish, and went in for weak tea and dry toast, and on Monday
he was gorging himself on chicken broth. He left the ship
on Tuesday, and as it steamed away from the landing-stage he
gazed after it regretfully.</p>
<p>“There she goes,” he said, “there she goes,
with two pounds’ worth of food on board that belongs to me,
and that I haven’t had.”</p>
<p>He said that if they had given him another day he thought he
could have put it straight.</p>
<p>So I set my face against the sea trip. Not, as I
explained, upon my own account. I was never queer.
But I was afraid for George. George said he should be all
right, and would rather like it, but he would advise Harris and
me not to think of it, as he felt sure we should both be
ill. Harris said that, to himself, it was always a mystery
how people managed to get sick at sea—said he thought
people must do it on purpose, from affectation—said he had
often wished to be, but had never been able.</p>
<p>Then he told us anecdotes of how he had gone across the
Channel when it was so rough that the passengers had to be tied
into their berths, and he and the captain were the only two
living souls on board who were not ill. Sometimes it was he
and the second mate who were not ill; but it was generally he and
one other man. If not he and another man, then it was he by
himself.</p>
<p>It is a curious fact, but nobody ever is sea-sick—on
land. At sea, you come across plenty of people very bad
indeed, whole boat-loads of them; but I never met a man yet, on
land, who had ever known at all what it was to be sea-sick.
Where the thousands upon thousands of bad sailors that swarm in
every ship hide themselves when they are on land is a
mystery.</p>
<p>If most men were like a fellow I saw on the Yarmouth boat one
day, I could account for the seeming enigma easily enough.
It was just off Southend Pier, I recollect, and he was leaning
out through one of the port-holes in a very dangerous
position. I went up to him to try and save him.</p>
<p>“Hi! come further in,” I said, shaking him by the
shoulder. “You’ll be overboard.”</p>
<p>“Oh my! I wish I was,” was the only answer I could
get; and there I had to leave him.</p>
<p>Three weeks afterwards, I met him in the coffee-room of a Bath
hotel, talking about his voyages, and explaining, with
enthusiasm, how he loved the sea.</p>
<p>“Good sailor!” he replied in answer to a mild
young man’s envious query; “well, I did feel a little
queer <i>once</i>, I confess. It was off Cape Horn.
The vessel was wrecked the next morning.”</p>
<p>I said:</p>
<p>“Weren’t you a little shaky by Southend Pier one
day, and wanted to be thrown overboard?”</p>
<p>“Southend Pier!” he replied, with a puzzled
expression.</p>
<p>“Yes; going down to Yarmouth, last Friday three
weeks.”</p>
<p>“Oh, ah—yes,” he answered, brightening up;
“I remember now. I did have a headache that
afternoon. It was the pickles, you know. They were
the most disgraceful pickles I ever tasted in a respectable
boat. Did <i>you</i> have any?”</p>
<p>For myself, I have discovered an excellent preventive against
sea-sickness, in balancing myself. You stand in the centre
of the deck, and, as the ship heaves and pitches, you move your
body about, so as to keep it always straight. When the
front of the ship rises, you lean forward, till the deck almost
touches your nose; and when its back end gets up, you lean
backwards. This is all very well for an hour or two; but
you can’t balance yourself for a week.</p>
<p>George said:</p>
<p>“Let’s go up the river.”</p>
<p>He said we should have fresh air, exercise and quiet; the
constant change of scene would occupy our minds (including what
there was of Harris’s); and the hard work would give us a
good appetite, and make us sleep well.</p>
<p>Harris said he didn’t think George ought to do anything
that would have a tendency to make him sleepier than he always
was, as it might be dangerous. He said he didn’t very
well understand how George was going to sleep any more than he
did now, seeing that there were only twenty-four hours in each
day, summer and winter alike; but thought that if he <i>did</i>
sleep any more, he might just as well be dead, and so save his
board and lodging.</p>
<p>Harris said, however, that the river would suit him to a
“T.” I don’t know what a “T”
is (except a sixpenny one, which includes bread-and-butter and
cake <i>ad lib.</i>, and is cheap at the price, if you
haven’t had any dinner). It seems to suit everybody,
however, which is greatly to its credit.</p>
<p>It suited me to a “T” too, and Harris and I both
said it was a good idea of George’s; and we said it in a
tone that seemed to somehow imply that we were surprised that
George should have come out so sensible.</p>
<p><SPAN href="images/p17b.jpg">
<ANTIMG class='floatright' alt= "Montmorency" title= "Montmorency" src="images/p17s.jpg" /></SPAN>The only one who was not struck with the suggestion was
Montmorency. He never did care for the river, did
Montmorency.</p>
<p>“It’s all very well for you fellows,” he
says; “you like it, but <i>I</i> don’t.
There’s nothing for me to do. Scenery is not in my
line, and I don’t smoke. If I see a rat, you
won’t stop; and if I go to sleep, you get fooling about
with the boat, and slop me overboard. If you ask me, I call
the whole thing bally foolishness.”</p>
<p>We were three to one, however, and the motion was carried.</p>
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