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Dr. Kenyon found the mucous membrane was irritated and required soothing.
"O Jupiter, &c."

Mrs. Dodd returned home consoled and confused; Julia listless and
apathetic. Tea was ordered, with two or three kinds of bread, thinnest
slices of meat, and a little blane mange, &c., their favourite repast
after a journey; and whilst the tea was drawing, Mrs. Dodd looked over
the card-tray and enumerated the visitors that had called during their
absence. "Dr. Short-- Mr. Osmond--Mrs. Hetherington--Mr. Alfred
Hardie--Lady Dewry--Mrs. and Miss Bosanquet. What a pity Edward was not
at home, dear; Mr. Alfred Hardie's visit must have been to him."

"Oh, of course, mamma."

"A very manly young gentleman."

"'Oh, yes. No. He is so rude."

"Is he? Ah! he was ill just then, and pain irritates gentlemen; they are
not accustomed to it, poor Things."

"That is like you, dear mamma; making excuses for one." Julia added
faintly, "But he is so impetuous."

"I have a daughter who reconciles me to impetuosity. And he _must_ have a
good heart, he was so kind to my boy."

Julia looked down smiling; but presently seemed to be seized with a
spirit of contradiction: she began to pick poor Alfred to pieces; he was
this, that, and the other; and then so bold, she might say impudent.

Mrs. Dodd replied calmly that he was very kind to her boy.

"Oh, mamma, you cannot approve all the words he spoke."

"It is not worth while to remember all the words young gentlemen speak
now-a-days. He was very kind to my boy, I remember that."

The tea was now ready, and Mrs. Dodd sat down, and patted a chair, with a
smile of invitation for Julia to come and sit beside her. But Julia said,
"In one minute, dear," and left the room.

When she came back, she fluttered up to her mother and kissed her
vehemently, then sat down radiant. "Ah!" said Mrs. Dodd, "why, you are
looking yourself once more. How do you feel now? Better?"

"How do I feel? Let me see: The world seems one e-nor-mous flower-garden,
and Me the butterfly it all belongs to." She spake, and to confirm her
words the airy thing went waltzing, sailing, and fluttering round the
room, and sipping mamma every now and then on the wing.

In this buoyancy she remained some twenty-four hours; and then came
clouds and chills, which, in their turn, gave way to exultation, duly
followed by depression. Her spirits were so uncertain, that things too
minute to justify narration turned the scale either way: a word from Mrs.
Dodd--a new face at St. Anne's Church looking devoutly her way--a piece
of town gossip distilled in her ear by Mrs. Maxley--and she was sprightly
or languid, and both more than reason.

One drizzly afternoon they were sitting silent and saddish in the
drawing-room, Mrs. Dodd correcting the mechanical errors in a drawing of
Julia's, and admiring the rare dash and figure, and Julia doggedly
studying Dr. Whately's Logic, with now and then a sigh, when suddenly a
trumpet seemed to articulate in the little hall: "Mestress Doedd at home
?"

The lady rose from her seat, and said with a smile of pleasure, "I hear a
voice."

The door opened, and in darted a grey-headed man, with handsome but
strongly marked features, laughing and shouting like a schoolboy broke
loose. He cried out, "Ah! I've found y' out at last." Mrs. Dodd glided to
meet him, and put out both her hands, the palms downwards, with the
prettiest air of ladylike cordiality; he shook them heartily. "The
vagabins said y' had left the town; but y' had only flitted from the quay
to the subbubs; 'twas a pashint put me on the scint of ye. And how are y'
all these years? an' how's Sawmill?"

"Sawmill! What is that?"

"It's just your husband. Isn't his name Sawmill?"

"Dear no! Have you forgotten?--David."

"Ou, ay. I knew it was some Scripcher Petrarch or another, Daavid, or
Naathan, or Sawmill. And how is he, and where is he?"

Mrs. Dodd replied that he was on the seas, but expect----

"Then I wish him well off 'em, confound 'em oncannall! Halloa! why, this
will be the little girl grown up int' a wumman while ye look round."

"Yes, may good friend; and her mother's darling."

"And she's a bonny lass, I can tell ye. But no freend to the Dockers, I
see."

"Ah!" said Mrs. Dodd sadly, "looks are deceitful; she is under medical
advice at this very----"

"Well, that won't hurt her, unless she takes it." And he burst into a
ringing laugh: but in the middle of it, stopped dead short, and his face
elongated. "Lord sake, mad'm," said he impressively," mind what y' are
at, though; Barkton's just a trap for fanciful femuls: there's a n'oily
ass called Osmond, and a canting cut-throat called Stephenson and a
genteel, cadaveris old assassin called Short, as long as a maypole;
they'd soon take the rose out of Miss Floree's cheek here. Why, they'd
starve Cupid, an' veneseck Venus, an' blister Pomonee, the vagabins."

Mrs. Dodd looked a little confused, and exchanged speaking glances with
Julia. " However," she said calmly, "I _have_ consulted Mr. Osmond and
Dr. Short; but have not relied on them alone. I have taken her to Sir
William Best. And to Dr. Chalmers. And to Dr. Kenyon." And she felt
invulnerable behind her phalanx of learning and reputation.

"Good Hivens!" roared the visitor, "what a gauntlet o' gabies for one
girl to run; and come out alive! And the picter of health. My faith, Miss
Floree, y' are tougher than ye look."

"My daughter's name is Julia," observed Mrs. Dodd, a little haughtily;
but instantly recovering herself, she said, "This is Dr. Sampson,
love--an old friend of your mother's."

"And th' Author an' Invintor of th' great Chronothairmal Therey o'
Midicine, th' Unity Perriodicity an' Remittency of all disease," put in
the visitor, with such prodigious swiftness of elocution that the words
went tumbling over one another like railway carriages out on pleasure,
and the sentence was a pile of loud, indistinct syllables.

Julia's lovely eyes dilated at this clishmaclaver, and she bowed coldly.
Dr. Sampson had revealed in this short interview nearly all the
characteristics of voice, speech, and manner, she had been taught from
infancy to shun: boisterous, gesticulatory, idiomatic; and had taken the
discourse out of her mamma's mouth twice. Now Albion Villa was a Red
Indian hut in one respect: here nobody interrupted.

Mrs. Dodd had little personal egotism, but she had a mother's, and could
not spare this opportunity of adding another Doctor to her collection: so
she said hurriedly, "Will you permit me to show you what your learned
confreres have prescribed her?" Julia sighed aloud, and deprecated the
subject with earnest furtive signs; Mrs. Dodd would not see them. Now,
Dr. Sampson was himself afflicted with what I shall venture to call a
mental ailment; to wit, a furious intolerance of other men's opinions; he
had not even patience to hear them. "Mai--dear--mad'm," said he hastily,
"when you've told me their names, that's enough. Short treats her for
liver, Sir William goes in for lung disease or heart, Chalmers sis it's
the nairves, and Kinyon the mookis membrin; and _I_ say they are fools
and lyres all four."

"Julia!" ejaculated Mrs. Dodd, "this is very extraordinary."

"No, it is not extraordinary," cried Dr. Sampson defiantly; "nothing is
extraordinary. D'ye think I've known these shallow men thirty years, and
not plumbed 'um?"

"Shallow, my good friend? Excuse me! they are the ablest men in your own
branch of your own learned profession."

"Th' ablest! Oh, you mean the money-makingest: now listen me! our lairned
Profession is a rascally one. It is like a barrel of beer. What rises to
the top?" Here he paused for a moment, then answered himself furiously,
"THE SCUM."

This blast blown, he moderated a little. "Look see!" said he, "up to
three or four thousand a year, a Docker is often an honest man, and
sometimes knows something of midicine; not much, because it is not taught
anywhere. But if he is making over five thousand, he must be a rogue or
else a fool: either he has booed an' booed, an' cript an' crawled, int'
wholesale collusion with th' apothecary an' the accoucheur--the two
jockeys that drive John Bull's faemily coach--and they are sucking the
pashint togither, like a leash o' leeches: or else he has turned
spicialist; has tacked his name to some poplar disorder, real or
imaginary; it needn't exist to be poplar. Now, those four you have been
to are spicialists, and that means monomaniues--their buddies exspatiate
in West-ind squares, but their souls dwell in a n'alley, ivery man jack
of 'em: Aberford's in Stomich Alley, Chalmers's in Nairve Court, Short's
niver stirs out o' Liver Lane, Paul's is stuck fast in Kidney Close,
Kinyon's in Mookis Membrin Mews, and Hibbard's in Lung Passage. Look see!
nixt time y' are out of sorts, stid o' consultin' three bats an' a n'owl
at a guinea the piece, send direct to me, and I'll give y' all their
opinions, and all their prescriptions, _gratis._ And deevilich dear ye'll
find 'em at the price, if ye swallow 'm."

Mrs. Dodd thanked him coldly for the offer, but said she would be more
grateful if he would show his superiority to persons of known ability by
just curing her daughter on the spot.

"Well, I will," said he carelessly: and all his fire died out of him.
"Put out your tongue!--Now your pulse!"

Mrs. Dodd knew her man (ladies are very apt to fathom their male
acquaintance--too apt, _I_ think); and, to pin him to the only medical
theme which interested her, seized the opportunity while he was in actual
contact with Julia's wrist, and rapidly enumerated her symptoms, and also
told him what Mr. Osmond had said about Hyperaesthesia.

"GOOSE GREECE!" barked Sampson, loud, clear, and sharp as an irritated
watch-dog; but this one bow-wow vented, he was silent as abruptly.

Mrs. Dodd smiled, and proceeded to Hyperaemia, and thence to the
Antiphlogistic Regimen,

At that unhappy adjective, Sampson jumped up, cast away his patient's
hand, forgot her existence--she was but a charming individual--and
galloped into his native region, Generalities.

"Antiphlogistic! Mai--dear--mad'm, that one long fragmint of ass's jaw
has slain a million. Adapted to the weakness of human nature, which
receives with rivirince ideas however childish, that come draped in
long-tailed and exotic words, that aasimine polysyllable has riconciled
the modern mind to the chimeras of th' ancients, and outbutchered the
guillotine, the musket, and the sword: ay, and but for me

Had barred the door
For cinturies more

on the great coming sceince, the sceince of healing diseases, instead of
defining and dividing 'em and lengthening their names and their durashin,
and shortening nothing but the pashint. Th' Antiphlogistic Therey is
this: That disease is fiery, and that any artificial exhaustion of vital
force must cool the system, and reduce the morbid fire, called, in their
donkey Latin 'flamma,' and in their compound donkey Latin 'inflammation,'
and in their Goose Greece, 'phlogosis,' 'phlegmon,' &c. And accordingly
th' Antiphlogistic Practice is, to cool the sick man by bleeding him,
and, when blid, either to rebleed him with a change of instrument, bites
and stabs instid of gashes, or else to rake the blid, and then blister
the blid and raked, and then push mercury till the teeth of the blid,
raked, and blistered shake in their sockets, and to starve the blid,
purged, salivated, blistered wretch from first to last. This is the
Antiphlogistic system. It is seldom carried out entire, because the
pashint, at the first or second link in their rimedial chain, expires; or
else gives such plain signs of sinking, that even these ass-ass-ins take
fright, and try t' undo their own work, not disease's, by tonics an'
turtle, and stimulants: which things given at the right time instead of
the wrong, given when the pashint was merely weakened by his disorder,
and not enfeebled by their didly rinmedies, would have cut th' ailment
down in a few hours."

"Dear me," said Mrs. Dodd; "and now, my good friend, with respect to _my
daughter_----

"N' list _me!_" clashed Sampson; "ye're goen to fathom th'
antiphlogistics, since they still survive an' slay in holes and corners
like Barkton and d'Itly; I've driven the vamperes out o' the cintres o'
civilisation. Begin with their coolers! Exhaustion is not a cooler, it is
a feverer, and they know it; the way parrots know sentences. Why are we
all more or less feverish at night? Because we are weaker. Starvation is
no cooler, it is an inflamer, and they know it--as parrots know truths,
but can't apply them: for they know that burning fever rages in ivery
town, street, camp, where Famine is. As for blood-letting, their prime
cooler, it is inflammatory; and they know it (parrot-wise), for the
thumping heart and bounding pulse of pashints blid by butchers in black,
and bullocks blid by butchers in blue, prove it; and they have recorded
this in all their books: yet stabbed, and bit, and starved, and
mercuried, and murdered on. But mind ye, all their sham coolers are real
weakeners (I wonder they didn't inventory Satin and his brimstin lake
among their refrijrators), and this is the point whence t' appreciate
their imbecility, and the sairvice I have rendered mankind in been the
first t' attack their banded school, at a time it seemed imprignable."

"Ah! this promises to be very interesting," sighed Mrs. Dodd; "and before
you enter on so large a field, perhaps it would be as well to dispose of
a little matter which lies at my heart. Here is _my poor daughter_----"

"NLISSMEE! A human Bean is in a constant state of flux and reflux; his
component particles move, change, disappear, and are renewed; his life is
a round of exhaustion and repair. Of this repair the brain is the
sovereign ajint by night and day, and the blood the great living
material, and digestible food th' indispensible supply. And this balance
of exhaustion and repair is too nice to tamper with: disn't a single
sleepless night, or dinnerless day, write some pallor on the face, and
tell against the buddy? So does a single excessive perspiration, a
trifling diary, or a cut finger, though it takes but half an ounce of
blood out of the system. And what is the cause of that rare ivint--which
occurs only to pashmints that can't afford docking--Dith from old age?
Think ye the man really succumms under years, or is mowed down by Time?
Nay, yon's just Potry an' Bosh. Nashins have been thinned by the lancet,
but niver by the scythe; and years are not forces, but misures of events.
No, Centenarius decays and dies bekase his bodil' expindituire goes on,
and his bodil' income falls off by failure of the reparative and
reproductive forces. And now suppose bodil' exhaustion and repair were a
mere matter of pecuniary, instead of vital, economy: what would you say
to the steward or housekeeper, who, to balance your accounts and keep you
solvent, should open every known channel of expinse with one hand, and
with the other--stop the supplies? Yet this is how the Dockers for thirty
cinturies have burned th' human candle at both ends, yet wondered the
light of life expired under their hands."

"It seems irrational. Then in _my daughter's_ case you would----"

"Looksee! A pashint falls sick. What haps directly? Why the balance is
troubled, and exhaustion exceeds repair. For proof obsairve the buddy
when Disease is fresh!

And you will always find a loss of flesh

to put it economikly, and then you must understand it, bein a
housekeeper--

Whativer the Disease, its form or essence,
Expinditure goes on, and income lessens.

But to this sick and therefore weak man, comes a Docker purblind with
cinturies of Cant, Pricidint, Blood, and Goose Greece; imagines him a
fiery pervalid, though the common sense of mankind through its
interpreter common language, pronounces him an 'invalid,' gashes him with
a lancet, spills out the great liquid material of all repair by the
gallon, and fells this weak man, wounded now, and pale, and fainting,
with Dith stamped on his face, to th' earth, like a bayoneted soldier or
a slaughtered ox. If the weak man, wounded thus, and weakened, survives,
then the chartered Thugs who have drained him by the bung-hole, turn to
and drain him by the spigot; they blister him, and then calomel him: and
lest Nature should have the ghost of a chance to conterbalance these
frightful outgoings, they keep strong meat and drink out of his system
emptied by their stabs, bites, purges, mercury, and blisters; damdijjits!
And that, Asia excipted, was profissional Midicine from Hippocrates to
Sampsin. Antiphlogistic is but a modern name for an ass-ass-inating
rouutine which has niver varied a hair since scholastic midicine, the
silliest and didliest of all the hundred forms of Quackery, first
rose--unlike Seeince, Art, Religion, and all true Suns--in the West; to
wound the sick; to weaken the weak; and mutilate the hurt; and thin
mankind."

The voluble impugner of his own profession delivered these two last words
in thunder so sudden and effective as to strike Julia's work out of her
hands. But here, as in Nature, a moment's pause followed the thunderclap;
so Mrs. Dodd, who had long been patiently watching her opportunity,
smothered a shriek, and edged in a word: "This is irresistible; you have
confuted everybody, to their heart's content; and now the question is,
what course shall we substitute?" She meant, "in the great case, which
occupies me." But Sampson attached a nobler, wider, sense to her query.
"What course? Why the great Chronothairmal practice, based on the
remittent and febrile character of all disease; above all, on

The law of Perriodicity, a law
Midicine yet has wells of light to draw.

By Remittency, I mean th' ebb of Disease, by Perriodicity, th' ebb and
also the flow, the paroxysm and the remission. These remit and recur, and
keep tune like the tides, not in ague and remittent fever only, as the
Profission imagines to this day, but in all diseases from a Scirrhus in
the Pylorus t' a toothache. And I discovered this, and the new path to
cure of all diseases it opens. Alone I did it; and what my reward?
Hooted, insulted, belied, and called a quack by the banded school of
profissional assassins, who, in their day hooted Harvey and
Jinner--authors too of great discoveries, but discoveries narrow in their
consequences compared with mine. T' appreciate Chronothairmalism, ye must
begin at the beginning; so just answer me--What is man?"

At this huge inquiry whirring tip all in a moment, like a cock-pheasant
in a wood, Mrs. Dodd sank back in her chair despondent. Seeing her _hors
de combat,_ Sampson turned to Julia and demanded, twice as loud, "WHAT IS
MAN?" Julia opened two violet eyes at him, and then looked at her mother
for a hint how to proceed.

"How can that child answer such a question?" sighed Mrs. Dodd. "Let us
return to the point."

"I have never strayed an inch from it. It's about 'Young Physic.'"

"No, excuse me, it is about a young lady. Universal Medicine: what have I
to do with that?"

"Now this is the way with them all," cried Sampson, furious; "there lowed
John Bull. The men and women of this benighted nashin have an ear for
anything, provided it matters nothing: talk Jology, Conchology,
Entomology, Theology, Meteorology, Astronomy, Deuteronomy, Botheronomy,
or Boshology, and one is listened to with rivirence, because these are
all far-off things in fogs; but at a word about the great, near, useful
art of Healing, y'all stop your ears; for why? your life and
dailianhourly happiness depend on it. But 'no,' sis John Bull, the
knowledge of our own buddies, and how to save our own Bakin--Beef I
mean--day by day, from disease and chartered ass-ass-ins, all that may
interest the thinkers in Saturn, but what the deevil is it t' _us?_ Talk
t' _us_ of the hiv'nly buddies, not of our own; babble o' comets an'
meteors an' Ethereal nibulae (never mind the nibulae in our own skulls).
Discourse t' us of Predistinashin, Spitzbairgen seaweed, the last novel,
the siventh vile; of Chrisehinising the Patagonians on condition they are
not to come here and Chrischinise the Whitechapelians; of the letter to
the _Times_ from the tinker wrecked at Timbuctoo; and the dear
Professor's lecture on the probabeelity of snail-shells in the backyard
of the moon: but don't ask us to know ourselves--Ijjits!!"

The eloquent speaker, depressed by the perversity of Englishmen in giving
their minds to every part of creation but their bodies, suffered a
momentary loss of energy; then Mrs. Dodd, who had long been watching
lynx-like, glided in. "Let us compound. You are for curing all the world,
beginning with Nobody. My ambition is to cure _my girl,_ and leave
mankind in peace. Now, if you will begin with _my Julia,_ I will submit
to rectify the universe in its proper turn. Any time will do to set the
human race right; you own it is in no hurry: but _my child's_ case
presses; so do pray cure her for me. Or at least tell me what her
Indisposition is."

"Oh! What! didn't I tell you? Well, there's nothing the matter with her."

At receiving this cavalier reply for the reward of all her patience, Mrs.
Dodd was so hurt, and so nearly angry, that she rose with dignity from
her seat, her cheek actually pink, and the water in her eyes. Sampson saw
she was ruffled, and appealed to Julia--of all people. "There now, Miss
Julia," said he, ruefully; "she is in a rage because I won't humbug her.
Poplus voolt decipee. I tell you, ma'am, it is not a midical case. Give
me disease and I'll cure 't. Stop, I'll tell ye what do: let her take and
swallow the Barkton Docks' prescriptions, and Butcher Best's, and canting
Kinyon's, and after those four tinkers there'll be plenty holes to mend;
then send for me!"

Here was irony. Mrs. Dodd retorted by _finesse._ She turned on him with a
treacherous smile, and said: "Never mind doctors and patients; it is so
long since we met; I do hope you will waive ceremony, and dine with me
_en ami._"

He accepted with pleasure; but must return to his inn first and get rid
of his dirty boots and pashints. And with this he whipped out his watch,
and saw that, dealing with universal medicine, he had disappointed more
than one sick individual; so shot out as hard as he had shot in, and left
the ladies looking at one another after the phenomenon.

"Well?" said Julia, with a world of meaning.

"Yes, dear," replied Mrs. Dodd, "he _is_ a little eccentric. I think I
will request them to make some addition to the dinner."

"No, mamma, if you please, not to put me off so transparently. If I had
interrupted, and shouted, and behaved so, you would have packed _me_ off
to bed, or somewhere, directly."

"Don't say 'packed,' love. Dismissed me to bed."

"Ah!" cried Julia, "that privileged person is gone, and we must all mind
our P's and Q's once more."

Mrs. Dodd, with an air of nonchalance, replied to the effect that Dr.
Sampson was not her offspring, and so she was not bound to correct his
eccentricities. "And I suppose," said she, languidly, "we must accept
these extraordinary people as we find them. But that is no reason why
_you_ should say 'P's and Q's,' darling."

That day her hospitable board was spread over a trap. Blessed with an
oracle irrelevantly fluent, and dumb to the point, she had asked him to
dinner with maternal address. He could not be on his guard eternally;
sooner or later, through inadvertence, or in a moment of convivial
recklessness, or in a parenthesis of some grand Generality, he would cure
her child: or, perhaps, at his rate of talking, would wear out all his
idle themes, down to the very "well-being of mankind;" and them Julia's
mysterious indisposition would come on the blank tapis. With these secret
hopes she presided at the feast, all grace and gentle amity. Julia, too,
sat down with a little design, but a very different one, viz., of being
chilly company; for she disliked this new acquaintance, and hated the
science of medicine.

The unconscious Object chatted away with both, and cut their replies very
short, and did strange things: sent away Julia's chicken, regardless of
her scorn, and prescribed mutton; called for champagne and made her drink
it and pout; and thus excited Mrs. Dodd's hopes that he was attending to
the case by degrees.

But after dinner, Julia, to escape medicine universal and particular,
turned to her mother, and dilated on treachery of her literary guide, the
_Criticaster._ "It said 'Odds and Ends' was a good novel to read by the
seaside. So I thought then oh! how different it must be from most books,
if you can sit by the glorious sea and even look at it. So I sent for it
directly, and, would you believe, it was an ignoble thing; all
flirtations and curates. The sea indeed! A pond would be fitter to read
it by; and one with a good many geese on."

"Was ever such simplicity!" said Mrs. Dodd. "Why, my dear, that phrase
about the sea does not _mean_ anything. I shall have you believing that
Mr. So-and-So, a novelist, can _'wither fashionable folly,'_ and that _'a
painful incident'_ to one shopkeeper has _'thrown a gloom'_ over a whole
market-town, and so on. Now-a-days every third phrase is of this
character; a starling's note. Once, it appears, there was an age of gold,
and then came one of iron, and then of brass. All these are gone, and the
age of 'jargon' has succeeded."