He is not a very romantic Damon is Doctor Jolly, nor is he at the present time to be seen under favourable circumstances, or in the most picturesque of situations.
The fact is, Dr Jolly has got an attack of the gout, “his old friend,” as he calls that hereditary and choleric disease; and here he is, seated in his snug parlour—he knew how to live well and be comfortable did the doctor—with his feet in a pail of cold water, like Patience on a monument smiling at grief; (one can’t help quoting the “noble bard.”) He was pursuing a rather violent method for reducing the inflammation in his pedal extremities in order that he might be able to go out and pay his usual pharmaceutical round of visits, and he was writhing and swearing inwardly, most probably, and often aloud, from the pain of the gout and remedy combined.
“Bless my soul! Deb!” he exclaimed, as irascibly as his natural good temper would allow, to his sister Deborah, our Pythias, who was in the room along with him. “Bless my soul! Whew I what a twinge. Confound the gout, Deborah!”
“Confound it with all my heart, Richard, if it will do you any good,” she replied, calmly, drawing the thread through the heel of a stocking which she was darning; “but you know, Richard, it’s your own fault. You will drink that port wine, and you must take the consequences.”
“Bosh, Deb; don’t preach. Why, I only drank two glasses yesterday at lunch, and—”
“How about the bottle after dinner?”
“Well, you know, Pringle was here, and hospitality you know, Deb, hospitality you know—”
“Hospitality won’t preserve your health, Richard.”
“True Deb, quite true; but I couldn’t help it, and the gout’s getting better now, the pain’s nearly gone. Whew! there’s another twinge. Confound the gout, I say!”
Damon was a stout, florid, jolly-looking—there is no other word so expressive—man of forty-five or thereabouts; Pythias—some apology is due for her sex in carrying out the classical metaphor, although when you know her better you will acknowledge the propriety of the allusion—was some five years the elder, as she could look back with complacency or otherwise on her fiftieth birthday. She was tall and ungainly, and her face was so set and deficient of mobility that it looked as if it were carved out of mahogany, to which wood indeed its colour bore some resemblance. She evidently took after her male parent more than her mother, and her brother was right when he called her a “chip of the old block.”