“No chance of our removing to Peter Gelid’s this evening.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Oh, poor Pepperpot Wagtail is become alarmingly ill; inflammatory symptoms have appeared, and”—Here the colloquy was cut short by the entrance of Mrs Peter Celid—a pretty woman enough. She had come to learn herself from our landlady, how Mr Wagtail was, and with the kindliness of the country, she volunteered to visit poor little Waggy in his sick-bed. I did not go into the room with her; but when she returned, she startled us all a good deal, by stating her opinion that the worthy man was really very ill, in which she was corroborated by the doctor, who now arrived. So soon as the medico saw him, he bled him, and after prescribing a lot of effervescing draughts, and various febrifuge mixtures, he left a large blister with the old brown landlady, to be applied over his stomach if the wavering and flightiness did not leave him before morning. We returned early after dinner from Mr N——‘s to our lodgings, and as I knew Gelid was expected at his brother’s in the evening, to meet a large assemblage of kindred, and as the night was rainy and tempestuous, I persuaded him to trust the watch to me; and as our brown landlady had been up nearly the whole of the previous night, I sent for Tailtackle to spell me, while the black valets acted with great assiduity in their capacity of surgeon’s mates. About two in the morning Mr Wagtail became delirious, and it was all that I could do, aided by my sable assistants, and an old black nurse, to hold him down in his bed. Now was the time to clap on the blister, but he repeatedly tore it off, so that at length we had to give it up for an impracticable job; and Tailtackle, whom I had called from his pallet, where he had gone to lie down for an hour, placed the caustico, as the Spaniards call it, at the side of the bed.
“No use in trying this any more at present,” said I; “we must wait until he gets quieter, Mr Tailtackle; so go to your bed, and I shall lie down on this sofa here, where Marie Paparoche” (this was our old landlady) “has spread sheets, I see, and made all comfortable. And send Mr Bang’s servant, will you;” (friend Aaron had ridden into the country after dinner to visit a friend, and the storm, as I conjectured, had kept him there;) “he is fresh, and will call me in case I be wanted, or Mr Wagtail gets worse.”
I lay down, and soon fell fast asleep, and I remembered nothing, until I awoke about eleven o’clock next morning, and heard Mr Bang speaking to Wagtail, at whose bedside he was standing.
“Pepperpot, my dear, be thankful—you are quite cool—a fine moisture on your skin this morning—be thankful, my little man how did your blister rise?”
“My good friend,” quoth Wagtail, in a thin weak voice, “I can’t tell—I don’t know; but this I perceive, that I am unable to rise, whether it has risen or no.”
“Ah—weak,” quoth Gelid, who had now entered the room.
“Nay,” said Pepperpot, “not so weak as deucedly sore, and on a very unromantic spot, my dears.”
“Why,” said Aaron, “the pit of the stomach is not a very genteel department, nor the abdomen neither.”