“I wonder, sir, if at any time of your life you got a severe wetting?”
The modern physician is most earnest in recommending changes of air and scene and employment. He is an enemy to the drug system. But the last enemy that shall be destroyed is the drug system. The “masses” believe in it as they believe no other system, whether in medicine, religion, or even gambling.
I shall never forget the ring of contempt that there was in the voice of a servant of mine at the Cape, when, on the army surgeon’s giving him a prescription to be made up, he found that the whole thing only cost fourpence, and he said,—
“That there coor can’t be much of a coor, sir; only corst fourpence, and me ready to pay ‘arf-a-crown.”
In the smoking-room of an hotel in Liverpool some years ago a rather self-assertive gentleman was dilating to a group in a cosy corner on the advantages of travel, not merely as a physical, but as an intellectual stimulant.
“Am I right, sir?” he cried, turning to me. “Have you ever travelled?”
I mentioned that I had done a little in that way.
“Where do you come from now, sir?” he asked.
“South America,” said I meekly.
“And you, sir,” he cried, turning to another stranger; “have you travelled?”