"Medical fiddlesticks! You've got to sit here like a maiden, to be wooed and won, and can't lift a finger or speak a word for yourself. Then there's that woman with the broken arm—Joe Smith's wife. Why shouldn't you tell that the barber didn't set it right, and that you had to reset it? I saw some of Joseph Smith's grandchildren the other day," she continued, suddenly changing the subject, "and I must say they don't look like the descendants of a prophet."
For a brief period in the unfolding spring Mrs. Lively experienced a little lifting of her spirits. The season was marvelously beautiful in Nauvoo: one serious expense, that for fuel, was stayed, and there was the promise of increased sickness, and thus increased work for the doctor. But this gleam was followed almost immediately by a shadow: a scientific paper which he had despatched to a leading magazine came back to him with the line, "Well written, but too heavy for our purposes."[1]
"I knew it was," said Mrs. Lively. "You write the driest, long-windedest things that ever I read."
Dr. Lively sighed, took his hat and went out, while Mrs. Lively, after some moments of irresolution, set about getting dinner.
"Now, where's your father?" she impatiently demanded when the dinner had been set on the table.
"Dunno," answered Master Napoleon through the potato by which his mouth was already possessed.
The Little Corporal, as he was sometimes called by virtue of his illustrious name, was a lean-faced lad with no friendly rolls of adipose to conceal the fact that he was cramming with all his energies.
"Why in the name of sense can't he come to his dinner?"
Napoleon gave a gulping swallow to clear his tongue. "Dunno," he managed to articulate, and then went off into a violent paroxysm of choking and coughing.
"Why don't you turn your head?" cried the mother, seizing the said member between her two hands and giving it an energetic twist that dislocated a bone or snapped a tendon, one might have surmised from the sharp crick-crack which accompanied the movement. "What in the name of decency makes you pack your mouth in that manner? Are you famished?"