This protector of each instant, this faithful guardian of your life, is, nevertheless, subject to you as a servant to his master. Attend to him, and he will obey your orders. You can make him go at a great pace, or slowly, as you choose; or stop him altogether, if the fancy takes you to do so: but this not for long. The servant of the good old times is obstinate in the performance of his duties. He will yield to you in trifles; but do not try to force him over serious matters. I have read somewhere of a desperate young fellow, chained down in a dungeon, who killed himself by holding his breath; but I never quite believed it. Mr. Diaphragm would not allow any one to carry rebellion so far as that.
But we have not finished yet, and you do not yet know how appropriate is the comparison I am making.
Should any misfortune, any grief, any trifling annoyance even, befall his master, a good servant suffers with him, and as much as he does; sometimes even more. Occasionally the master is comforted, while he remains still disturbed.
"And the diaphragm?" you ask.
The diaphragm does precisely the same, my dear child. Yours, especially, shares in all your griefs to such an extent that, truth to say, he is not always quite reasonable. The other day when your mamma did not want to take you into the country with her, he was so sorry for you that he went into perfect convulsions, and you sobbed and sobbed till she was obliged to say, "Come, then, you naughty child;" whereupon you embraced your mamma, and were quite happy again, while he remained still unappeased, and your poor little chest was shaken more than once afterwards by his last convulsions.
Sobbing, you must know, is merely a convulsion—a great shake of the diaphragm—which is the reason of its causing such a heaving of the chest.
It is the same with respect to joy. The joy of the master makes the servant dance, and so the diaphragm too! Its little internal jumps are, then, what we call laughter—a thing you are well acquainted with. Put your hand on your chest next time you laugh (and I hope it will be soon) and you will feel how it dances—thanks to the diaphragm which jumps for joy whenever it finds you in good humor.
Please to observe further, that nothing of all this is done to order. He starts of himself, poor fellow, without waiting to ask if you will ever know anything about it; and, in truth, you have known nothing about it up to the present moment.
What say you to the diaphragm now, my child? Does not the very name please you? You scarcely expected to find there—under your lungs—so good a servant, one so attached to your person, so strongly resembling in all points the best specimens we know among men. And still we have not done. I have reserved as a finale for you a new point of resemblance which will make you open your eyes very wide indeed.
The old servant is sometimes cross and grumbling. If anything is going against his grain in the house he has no scruple in saying so; and his mode of speaking is sometimes rather rude. Nor is it of any use to get impatient and impose silence on him; he will listen to nothing—it is his privilege. But let some unforeseen accident happen to his master, let him see him deeply affected, and in a moment all his anger is over. He sets himself silently to work again, recalled to order twenty times sooner by his master's emotion than by his utmost impatience.