"Not yet. But I shall as soon as my eyes get right!" I was able now to leave off sneezing, almost for a second. And when I had chewed a bit of leaf he gave me, there seemed to be something great in this new idea.
"You are concluding with your usual slur"—my brother began again, as soon as I was fit to receive reason instead of sympathy—"that this is nothing more than an adaptation of Lundy Foote, Irish blackguard, or Welsh Harp. George, you are wrong, as usual. You need not be capable of speech for that. Your gifts of error can express themselves in silence."
"Cowardly reasoner," I began, but the movement of larynx, or whatever it might be, threw me out of "ratiocination." He had me at his mercy, and he kept me so. To attempt to repeat what he said would convict me of crankiness equal to his own, and worse—because he could do it, and I cannot. But the point he insisted on most of all, and which after my experience I could not but concede, was that no known preparation of snuff without his special chemistry could have achieved this excellence.
"Pteroxylon, euphorbium, and another irritant unknown as yet to Chemists, have brought this to the power needful. But this is not a merely speculative thing. You feel a true interest in it now, George."
"As men praise mustard, with tears in their eyes. But let me never hear of it, think of it, most of all never smell the like again. My nose will be red, and my eyes sore for a fortnight."
Harold tucked my arm under his, with a very affectionate manner of his own, which he knew that I never could resist. "Four pockets always in your waistcoat," he observed, "and a flap over every one to keep it dry. Now I very seldom ask a favour, do I, George, of you? Here are three hundred little boxes here, as well as the bulk of my preparation. The boxes are perfectly air-tight, made from my own design, very little larger and not much thicker than an old crown-piece. You touch a spring here, and the box flies open. Without that you never would know that it was there. Promise me that you will always carry this, and open it whenever you come to a place where the Local Boards have got the roads up. One of my best friends, and I have not many, has lost his only little girl,—such a darling, she used to sit upon my knee and promise to marry me the moment she was big enough,—but now she has gone to a better world, through the new parish authorities. Diphtheria in the worst form, my dear boy!"
His eyes filled with tears, for he was very tender-hearted, and in the warmth of the moment, I promised to carry that little box of his, as a safeguard against sanitation.
"My dear George, you will never regret it. You will find it most useful, I can assure you." He spoke with some gratitude, for he knew how much I hated all such chemistry. Little did I think how true his words would prove.
"Why, there goes that extraordinary fellow Stoneman!" I exclaimed suddenly, to change the subject. "What a first-rate horse he always rides! But there is something I ought to tell you about that great Stockbroker. I have not told the Governor yet, because I was not meant to do so, and must not, without the man's consent. But you ought to know it, and he would not object to that."
"What has he discovered? I have often thought that men, who fall into the thick of humanity, ought to get their minds into an extremely active state; like mariners straining their eyes to discover—"