Within these walls

by Rupert Hughes

For the next twenty years a war would be waged upon the pain-killers, and the names of Morton, Jackson, and Wells would inspire immediate quarrel. Each had his retainers in the contest for what some called the “honor” of discovering the placid realm of anæsthesia; and what some called the “sacrilege” of its discovery.

It was written in the sibylline books of history as yet undisclosed that Wells should be finally humbled to insanity and suicide; and that Morton, after years of vain effort to get recognition, should retire to a farm, where he would die from the shock of reading a denial of his “pretensions.” They would put on his tombstone the legend: “By whom pain in surgery was averted and annulled; before whom, in all time, surgery was agony since whom science has had control of pain.” Yet one’s own epitaph is a little late, however flattering.

RoBards shared Patty’s reverence for the Prometheus who had snatched from heaven the anodyne to the earth’s worst curse. He made sure that she should have the advantage of the cloud of merciful oblivion when she went down into the dark of her last childbed.

Her final baby was born “still,” as they say; but Patty also was still during the ordeal. That was no little blessing. RoBards was spared the hell of listening in helplessness to such moans as Patty had hitherto uttered when her hour had come upon her unawares.

But the high hopes from this discovery were doomed to sink, for man seems never to get quite free from his primeval evils, and RoBards was to find that the God or the devil of pain had not yet been baffled by man’s puny inventions.

Longing for opportunities to exploit the suppressed braveries in his soul, RoBards found nothing to do but run to fires. There were enough of these and the flames fell alike upon the just and the unjust. Christ Church in Ann Street went up in blazes; the Bowery Theatre burned down for the fourth time; a sugar house in Duane Street was next, two men being killed and RoBards badly bruised by a tumbling wall. The stables of Kipp and Brown were consumed with over a hundred screaming horses; the omnibus stables of the Murphys roasted to death a hundred and fifty horses, and took with them two churches, a parsonage, and a school. While this fire raged, another broke out in Broome Street, another in Thirty-fifth Street and another in Seventeenth. The Park Theatre was burned for only the second time in its fifty years of life; but it stayed burned.

And then Patty succeeded in persuading her husband to resign from the volunteers and remove his boots and helmet from the basket under the bed.

This was the knell of his youth and he felt that he had been put out to grass like an old fire horse, but his heart leaped for years after when some old brazen-mouthed bell gave tongue. He left it to others, however, to take out the engine and chase the sparks.

He had come to the port of slippered evenings, but monotony was not yet his portion. For there were domestic fire bells now.

Patty and Immy were mutual combustibles. They had reached the ages when the mother forgets her own rebellious youth as completely as if she had drunk Lethe water; and when the daughter demands liberty for herself and imposes fetters on her elders.