My experiences in the Lowther Arcade were soon to be suddenly interrupted, and for a long time it was even doubtful whether I should ever again be able to put in an appearance in that place or anywhere else. I caught the scarlet fever, not in the slums as it might be thought, but at school, where a regular epidemic had broken out. Our class-rooms in King's College were down in the basement, and those who knew said that the outbreak was due to the fact that the filth-laden river came right up to the feet of the grand old building, and washed them dirty day and night; other wiseacres contended that it was more likely to be the churchyard of St. Mary-le-Grand just opposite which had done the mischief. As far as I can remember, nobody mentioned the drains, which in those days had not yet come into notice and fashion, and could do their level best for the multiplication of bacilli without being hampered by meddlesome sanitary inspectors. Well, whatever may have been the malignant source which poisoned me, it had done its work thoroughly, and developed my scarlet fever in its most virulent form. It was a terrible time I went through. I was at death's door, but fortunately that sombre portal remained closed, and I was not bidden to cross the grim threshold.
No, I was destined to live and to fight the battle of life with whatever fighting powers I might possess. Later on I was to wrestle more than once with the grim immortal who only spares each of us mortals till his hour-glass tells him it is time to use his scythe. And if I wrestled well and am here to tell the tale, it is because by my side watched day and night that best of nurses, my mother.
I was never what is called a good patient, and to this day I am very much averse to sending for the doctor. I quite feel he indeed is a friend in need, and I do not wish to disparage his power for good, or to underrate his skill and judgment, but as a rule I make a point of not calling him in till I know what I want him to say. I think that doctors nowadays are more agreeable than they were formerly; the great and fashionable doctors, I mean. A man, to be up to date, had to be brief, brusque, and bumptious. He seemed to have learnt his stronger English from Dr. Johnson, and generally to have been trained in a Johnsonian atmosphere. He had to say smart things that could be quoted and hawked about, and to enunciate wise saws in imitation of the master whose sayings are so unmercifully inflicted on us to this day. He was in a hurry; he drove up in a big yellow carriage, and before the horses could pull up, his tiger had sprung from the footboard, and was giving the most tremendous double-knock, one evidently meant to awaken the dead, in case medical assistance had come too late.
To pass muster, the doctor's natural kindness had to be concealed beneath an outer coating of apparent roughness. Sometimes it was the roughness that was concealed only by a transparent veneer of amiability. Certain it is that in those days no doctor could look at a boy's tongue without at once declaring that he stood in immediate need of a black dose, and if that vile compound did not exceed every other mixture in nastiness, he did not believe it would be efficacious. He revelled in blue pills, and was happiest when he could pull out a little lancet and bleed you, or send round a man with a complete set of sharp blades, to do the thing wholesale, jerking them into some part of your precious self, and pumping a given number of ounces out of it and into his cupping-glasses.
All this is very ungrateful of me, for Dr. Stone was the best and kindest of men—and very undutiful, for he was my godfather (Felix Stone is my full name). To be sure he had a big yellow carriage, and a tiger whose main ambition in life it seemed to be to knock his master's patients up. To be sure Dr. Stone came coated with a veneer of roughness, but it was skin-deep; true, he gave me as many black doses and blue pills as he thought my robust constitution could stand, but in addition to these he made me many beautiful presents—a silver mug emblazoned with our family crest and the motto "Labore," a splendid family Bible of about my own weight and size, a costly edition of Byron's "Childe Harold" and ditto of Milton's "Paradise Lost and Regained," and a number of other things doubly delightful and gratifying to my juvenile mind, because they always came at least three or four years before I knew how to use them.
My good godfather had ushered me into this world, from which unfortunately he was himself called away before he had had many opportunities of performing the duties he had undertaken when he pledged himself to see to it that I should "renounce the devil and all his works."
When after many weeks of hard fighting with the scarlet enemy, and after having passed through various relapses and complications, I emerged from the sick-room, I was taken to Brighton for a complete change of air. There I soon found new life and strength. Dear old Brighton! I was to find new life and strength there once more, thirty years later, when I met the young lady who said she would—when I asked her to marry me.
My next station was Hamburg. I was sent there to get the benefit of a thorough change of air, and to improve my German. It was shortly after the terrible conflagration which had laid low a great part of the city.
The jagged walls, springing in fantastic forms from immense piles of crumbling masonry and charred timber, had a weird fascination for me. I was deeply in sympathy with my beloved friend Architecture, and deplored the fate that had overtaken some of the best buildings, but at the same time I was lost in admiration of the beauties, now picturesque, now awe-inspiring, which the caprice of the destructive element had stamped on crazy walls and tangled masses of wreckage.
I have since been similarly impressed; in Pompeii first, and again in Paris, after the Commune; only to be sure the former scene of devastation I saw neatly put in order and made presentable for the visitor, whereas the latter was yet smoking and all besmirched with the blood of the sorely visited Parisians.