“A rough, untutored fellow, my lord; but reliable, according to his lights. They are not penetrating, perhaps; yet clear as regards the surface of things. You must forgive him. That was an original suggestion of yours. He would not grasp its inner significance, naturally. To cure sea-sickness, now. There is something in it.”
“I am happy,” minced the bantling, “in your Highnetheth commendation. That mal-de-mer is a very dithtrething thing. It maketh a man look a fool; and a man dothn’t like to look a fool.”
The Duke considered.
“But for the character of the remedy? What do you say to music? Music will not, according to Master George Herbert, cure the toothache: but is sea-sickness the toothache, my lord?”
“Not the toothache; no, Thir.”
“Is it not rather, by all reports, a surging or vertigo of the brain, induced by that reversal of the laws of equilibrium which transposes the offices, as it were, of matter animate and matter inanimate?”
“I—I take your Highnetheth word for it.”
“Why, it is clear. We are designed and organized, are we not, to be voluntary agents on a plane of stability?”
“Yeth, yeth, O yeth!”
“Very well. So we lie down or rise at will, the solid earth abetting. But supposing the parts reversed, ourselves the willingly quiescent, the earth the one to rise or fall? Would not our brain, devised on the opposite principle, be naturally upset, carrying with it the stomach, its most intimate relation?”