"Ye maun e'en promise never to dance again, Jessie."
"I wull, sir; I wull promise," with a courtesy.
"Now, what were ye thinking o', Jessie, when ye were dancin'? tell us truly," said an old elder, who had been a poacher in youth.
"Nae ill, sir," sobbed out the dear little woman.
"Then, Jessie, my woman, aye dance," cried the delighted Doctor.
And so say I, to the extent, that so long as our young girls think "nae ill," they may dance their own and their feet's fills; and so on with all the round of the sunshine and flowers God has thrown on and along the path of his children.
Lastly, your duty to your own bodies: to preserve them; to make, or rather let—for they are made so to go—their wheels go sweetly; to keep the girs firm round the old barrel; neither to over nor under work our bodies, and to listen to their teaching and their requests, their cries of pain and sorrow; and to keep them as well as your souls unspotted from the world. If you want to know a good book on Physiology, or the Laws of Health and of Life, get Dr. Combe's Physiology; and let all you mothers get his delightful Management of Infancy. You will love him for his motherly words. You will almost think he might have worn petticoats,—for tenderness he might; but in mind and will and eye he was every inch a man. It is now long since he wrote, but I have seen nothing so good since; he is so intelligent, so reverent, so full of the solemnity, the sacredness, the beauty, and joy of life, and its work; so full of sympathy for suffering, himself not ignorant of such evil,—for the latter half of his life was a daily, hourly struggle with death, fighting the destroyer from within with the weapons of life, his brain and his conscience. It is very little physiology that you require, so that it is physiology, and is suitable for your need. I can't say I like our common people, or indeed, what we call our ladies and gentlemen, poking curiously into all the ins and outs of our bodies as a general accomplishment, and something to talk of. No, I don't like it. I would rather they chose some other ology. But let them get enough to give them awe and love, light and help, guidance and foresight.
These, with good sense and good senses, humility, and a thought of a hereafter in this world as well as in the next, will make us as able to doctor ourselves—especially to act in the preventive service, which is your main region of power for good—as in this mortal world we have any reason to expect. And let us keep our hearts young, and they will keep our legs and our arms the same. For we know now that hearts are kept going by having strong, pure, lively blood; if bad blood goes into the heart, it gets angry, and shows this by beating at our breasts, and frightening us; and sometimes it dies of sheer anger and disgust, if its blood is poor or poisoned, thin and white. "He may dee, but he'll never grow auld," said a canty old wife of her old minister, whose cheek was ruddy like an apple.
Run for the Doctor; don't saunter to him, or go in, by the by, as an old elder of my father's did, when his house was on fire. He was a perfect Nathanael, and lived more in the next world than in this, as you will soon see. One winter night he slipped gently into his neighbor's cottage, and found James Somerville reading aloud by the blaze of the licht coal; he leant over the chair, and waited till James closed the book, when he said, "By the by, I am thinkin' ma hoose is on fire!" and out he and they all ran, in time to see the auld biggin' fall in with a glorious blaze. So it is too often when that earthly house of ours—our cottage, our tabernacle—is getting on fire. One moment your finger would put out what in an hour all the waters of Clyde would be too late for. If the Doctor is needed, the sooner the better. If he is not, he can tell you so, and you can rejoice that he had a needless journey, and pay him all the more thankfully. So run early and at once. How many deaths—how many lives of suffering and incapacity—may be spared by being in time! by being a day or two sooner. With children this is especially the case, and with workingmen in the full prime of life. A mustard plaster, a leech, a pill, fifteen drops of Ipecacuanha wine, a bran poultice, a hint, or a stitch in time, may do all and at once, when a red-hot iron, a basinful of blood, all the wisdom of our art, and all the energy of the Doctor, all your tenderness and care, are in vain. Many a child's life is saved by an emetic at night, who would be lost in twelve hours. So send in time; it is just to your child or the patient, and to yourself; it is just to your Doctor; for I assure you we Doctors are often sorry, and angry enough, when we find we are too late. It affronts us, and our powers, besides affronting life and all its meanings, and Him who gives it. And we really enjoy curing; it is like running and winning a race,—like hunting and finding and killing our game. And then remember to go to the Doctor early in the day, as well as in the disease. I always like my patients to send and say that they would like the Doctor "to call before he goes out!" This is like an Irish message, you will say; but there is "sinse" in it. Fancy a Doctor being sent for, just as he is in bed, to see some one, and on going he finds they had been thinking of sending in the morning, and that he has to run neck and neck with death, with the odds all against him.
I now wind up with some other odds and ends. I give you them as an old wife would empty her pockets,—such wallets they used to be!—in no regular order; here a bit of string, now a bit of gingerbread, now an "aiple," now a bunch of keys, now an old almanac, now three bawbees and a bad shilling, a "wheen" buttons all marrowless, a thimble, a bit of black sugar, and maybe at the very bottom a "goold guinea."