"Podagra!" said I; "Podagra!" said Tim; and "Podagra!" said the others. "What's that?"
"Gout!" said the doctor.
"Gout!" cried my friends; "Gout!!" roared my brother Tim; and "Gout!!!" yelled I, starting from the doctor as if from an imp of darkness who had just come to make claim to me. It was the unluckiest leap in the world; I kicked over a chair as I started, and the touch was as if I had clapped my foot into the jaws of a roaring lion. Crunch went every bone; crack went every sinew; and such a yell as I set up was never before heard in Chestnut-street.
"You see, gentlemen—(I'll take another glass of that port, Mr. Doolittle)—you see what we must all come to! This is one of the small penalties one must pay for being a gentleman; when one dances, one must pay the piper. Now would my friend Higginson there give a whole year of his best brewing, that all the pale ale and purple port that have passed his lips had been nothing better than elder-wine and bonny-clabber. But never mind, my dear sir," said the son of Æsculapius, with a coolness that shocked me; "as long as it's only in your foot, it's a small matter."
"A small matter!"—I grinned at him; but the unfeeling wretch only repeated his words—"A small matter!"
I had never been sick before in my life. As John H. Higginson, my worst complaints had been only an occasional surfeit, or a moderate attack of booziness; and as Sheppard Lee, I had never known any disease except laziness, which, being chronic, I had grown so accustomed to that it never troubled me. But now, ah, now! my first step into the world of enjoyment was to be made on red-hot ploughshares and pokers; my first hour of a life of content was to be passed in grinning, and groaning, and—but it is hardly worth while to say it. The gout should be confined to religious people; for men of the world will swear, and that roundly.
For six days——six mortal days——did I lay upon my back, enduring such horrible twitches and twinges in my foot, that I was more than once on the point of ordering the doctor to cut it off; and I do not know how far that conceit might have gone, had not the heartless fellow, who, I believe, was all the while making game of my torments, assured me that the only effect of the dismemberment would be to drive the enemy into the other foot, where it would play the same tricks over again. "The gout," said he, "has as great an affection for the human body as a cat has for a house in which she has been well treated. When it once effects a lodgment, and feels itself comfortable—"
"Comfortable!" said I, with a groan.
"In good easy quarters—"
"Don't talk to me of easy quarters," said I; "for if I were hacked into quarters, and that by the clumsiest butcher in the town, I could not be more uneasy in every quarter."