“Not exactly so, uncle. But I do mean to tell you that you have a sort of fire burning partly in your chest; but also, more or less, throughout your whole body.”
“Oh, Henry!” exclaimed Mrs. Wilkinson, “How can you say such horrid things!”
“Because they're quite true, mamma—but you needn't be frightened. The fire of one's body is not hotter than from ninety degrees to one hundred and four degrees or so. Still it is fire, and will burn some things, as you would find, uncle, if, in using phosphorus, you were to let a little bit of it get under your nail.”
“I'll take your word for the fact, my boy,” said Mr. Bagges. “But, if I have a fire burning throughout my person—which I was not aware of, the only inflammation I am ever troubled with being in the great toe—I say, if my body is burning continually—how is it I don't smoke—eh? Come, now?”
“Perhaps you consume your own smoke,” suggested Mr. Wilkinson, senior, “like every well-regulated furnace.”
“You smoke nothing but your pipe, uncle, because you burn all your carbon,” said Harry. “But, if your body doesn't smoke, it steams. Breathe against a looking-glass, or look at your breath on a cold morning. Observe how a horse reeks when it perspires. Besides—as you just now said you recollected my telling you the other day—you breathe out carbonic acid, and that, and the steam of the breath together, are exactly the same things, you know, that a candle turns into in burning.”
“But if I burn like a candle—why don't I burn out like a candle?” demanded Mr. Bagges. “How do you get over that?”
“Because,” replied Harry, “your fuel is renewed as fast as burnt. So perhaps you resemble a lamp rather than a candle. A lamp requires to be fed; so does the body—as, possibly, uncle, you may be aware.”
“Eh?—well—I have always entertained an idea of that sort,” answered Mr. Bagges, helping himself to some biscuits. “But the lamp feeds on train-oil.”
“So does the Laplander. And you couldn't feed the lamp on turtle or mulligatawny, of course, uncle. But mulligatawny or turtle can be changed into fat—they are so, sometimes, I think—when they are eaten in large quantities, and fat will burn fast enough. And most of what you eat turns into something which burns at last, and is consumed in the fire that warms you all over.”