“Who is sick, madam?” he inquired, when he had replaced the empty goblet on Reuben’s waiter.
“My son, sir,” said mother, conducting him to my lounge. “I don’t know that he is sick much, but he is feverish, and fever always frightens me.”
“And very properly, madam, for it is a sure sign that something is wrong in the system. Should always be taken in hand at once.”
He felt my pulse a long time, slipping his fingers up and down my wrist, as if he were playing the violin; then felt my forehead, touching it as he would a loaf of bread, to see if it were warm, and bade me put out my tongue. He put on his specs and bent over it, as if he were looking for a splinter, requesting mother to stand just a little out of the light, madam, and rubbing it with the end of his little finger, took off his spectacles triumphantly, and turning to mother said:
“There is no danger, madam; very slight fever; only a trifling disorder of the system. A good sized blue pill is all that I would recommend at present. If you have any blue mass in the house I will make it for you before I leave.”
The box of pil hydrarg was accordingly brought, and a cup of flour, from which he soon produced a pellet the size of a robin’s egg, which I was to swallow. There might be almost said to be only two medicines known to the physicians of eastern Carolina, so constantly are they required in their practice, and they are as certain to administer mercury or quinine as Dr. Sangrado, of Valladolid, was to let blood or give warm water. I certainly did not bless their mercurial predilections that morning, and saw the old doctor ride off with an earnest wish that he had a pill, as large as the conventional brick, to roll around his hat on his head.
He had hardly gotten out of sight when mother came to the couch with the pill in the hollow of one hand and a glass of water in the other.
“Here, son, try to swallow this. The doctor thinks it best that you should take it.”
I sat upon the side of the bed, asked for a bucket, in case of accidents, and took the pill in my hand. I found it soft, and sticky as putty, but with reckless desperation I laid it far back on my tongue, and took a great gulp of water. With a toss of my head I made a tremendous swallow, but a wad of air, many times larger than my mouth, got before the water and barred its progress down. Most of it got into my windpipe; the pill, with the flour coating washed off, and its nauseous taste revealed, rolled down against my front teeth and stuck there. Shades of Epicurus! how I heaved! Tearing it away from my teeth with my fingers I dashed it down, and vowed that no doctor’s authority could ever compel me to the attempt again.
Whether the very taste of the pill had a good effect or not, that evening I was much better, and next morning felt perfectly well.