“What is that stuff you’ve got there!” he inquired largely, seeing a bottle of somebody’s Soothing Syrup by a poor woman’s bedside. “Take it and throw it down the sink, and the next time you want a soothing syrup put a little boot-blacking in hot water. It’ll do you just as much good.”
Imagine the slow, pompous, large-mouthed way in which the red-faced, handsomely-built man pronounced these words, and you realize why the poor set such store by him.
He was eagle-eyed. Wherever he went, there was a scuffle directly his foot was heard on the stairs. And he knew they were hiding something. He sniffed the air: he glanced round with a sharp eye: and during the course of his visit picked up a blue mug which was pushed behind the looking-glass. He peered inside—and smelled it.
“Stout?” he said, in a tone of indignant inquiry: God-Almighty would presumably take on just such a tone, finding the core of an apple flung away among the dead-nettle of paradise: “Stout! Have you been drinking stout?” This as he gazed down on the wan mother in the bed.
“They gave me a drop, doctor. I felt that low.”
The doctor marched out of the room, still holding the mug in his hand. The sick woman watched him with haunted eyes. The attendant women threw up their hands and looked at one another. Was he going for ever? There came a sudden smash. The doctor had flung the blue mug downstairs. He returned with a solemn stride.
“There!” he said. “And the next person that gives you stout will be thrown down along with the mug.”
“Oh doctor, the bit o’ comfort!” wailed the sick woman. “It ud never do me no harm.”
“Harm! Harm! With a stomach as weak as yours! Harm! Do you know better than I do? What have I come here for? To be told by you what will do you harm and what won’t? It appears to me you need no doctor here, you know everything already—”
“Oh no, doctor. It’s not like that. But when you feel as if you’d sink through the bed, an’ you don’t know what to do with yourself—”