“What an extraordinary man is this Crutchley! I declare he has quite melted me! He came to me just now, and thinking I was uneasy I could do no more for Perkins,[142] though he cared not himself if the man were drowned, he offered to lend him a thousand pounds, merely by way of giving pleasure to me!”
MISS SOPHY STREATHIELD IS COMMENTED ON
Well-it was, I think, Saturday, Aug. 25, that Mrs Thrale brought me back.[143] We then took up Mr. Crutchley, who had come to his town-house upon business, and who accompanied us thither for a visit of three days.
In the evening Mr. Seward also came. He has been making the western tour, and gave us, with a seriousness that kept me continually grinning, some account of a doctor, apothecary, or 'chemist' belonging to every town at which he had stopped.
And when we all laughed at his thus following up the faculty, he undauntedly said,—
“I think it the best way to get information; I know no better method to learn what is going forward anywhere than to send for the chief physician of the place, so I commonly consult him the first day I stop at a place, and when I have fee'd him, and made acquaintance, he puts me in a way to find out what is worth looking at.”
A most curious mode of picking up a cicerone!
After this, still pursuing his favourite topic, he began to inquire into the particulars of Mr. Crutchley's late illness—but that gentleman, who is as much in the opposite extreme, of disdaining even any decent care of himself, as Mr. Seward is in the other, of devoting almost all his thoughts to his health cut the matter very short, and would not talk upon it at all.
“But, if I had known sooner,” said Mr. Seward, “that you were ill, I should have come to see you.”