This from the beck where it rushes down between the stems of mountain-ash, this from beneath the vast ancestral elm below the palace, this from the sea-shore. Marvellous! And I am eager to descend again; I have not explored the cliff which breaks the descent of the torrent, nor the thicket in the gully. There must be marchantia under the spray of the one, and possibly dittany in the peat of the other.
Pallas.
We must not detain you, Æsculapius. But tell us how you propose to adapt yourself to our new life. It seems to me that you are determined not to find it irksome.
Æsculapius.
Does it not occur to you, Pallas, that—although I should never have had the courage to adopt it—thus forced upon us it offers me the most dazzling anticipations? Hitherto my existence has been all theory. What there is to know about the principles of health as applied to the fluctuations of mortality, I may suppose is known to me. You might be troubled, Pallas, with every conceivable malady, from elephantiasis to earache, and I should be in a position to analyse and to deal with each in turn. You might be obscured by ophthalmia, crippled by gout or consumed to a spectre by phthisis, and I should be able, without haste, without anxiety, to unravel the coil, to reduce the nodosities, to make the fleshy instrument respond in melody to all your needs.
Pallas.
But you have never done this. We knew
that you could do it, and that has been enough for us.
Æsculapius.