and the water in her eyes. Sampson saw she was ruffled, and appealed to Julia—of all people. “There now, Miss Julia,” said he, ruefully; “she is in a rage because I won't humbug her. Poplus voolt decipee. I tell you, ma'am, it is not a midical case. Give me disease and I'll cure 't. Stop, I'll tell ye what do: let her take and swallow the Barkton Docks' prescriptions, and Butcher Best's, and canting Kinyon's, and after those four tinkers there'll be plenty holes to mend; then send for me!”
Here was irony. Mrs. Dodd retorted by finesse. She turned on him with a treacherous smile, and said: “Never mind doctors and patients; it is so long since we met; I do hope you will waive ceremony, and dine with me en ami.”
He accepted with pleasure; but must return to his inn first and get rid of his dirty boots and pashints. And with this he whipped out his watch, and saw that, dealing with universal medicine, he had disappointed more than one sick individual; so shot out as hard as he had shot in, and left the ladies looking at one another after the phenomenon.
“Well?” said Julia, with a world of meaning.
“Yes, dear,” replied Mrs. Dodd, “he is a little eccentric. I think I will request them to make some addition to the dinner.”
“No, mamma, if you please, not to put me off so transparently. If I had interrupted, and shouted, and behaved so, you would have packed me off to bed, or somewhere, directly.”
“Don't say 'packed,' love. Dismissed me to bed.”
“Ah!” cried Julia, “that privileged person is gone, and we must all mind our P's and Q's once more.”
Mrs. Dodd, with an air of nonchalance, replied to the effect that Dr. Sampson was not her offspring, and so she was not bound to correct his eccentricities. “And I suppose,” said she, languidly, “we must accept these extraordinary people as we find them. But that is no reason why you should say 'P's and Q's,' darling.”
That day her hospitable board was spread over a trap. Blessed with an oracle irrelevantly fluent, and dumb to the point, she had asked him to dinner with maternal address. He could not be on his guard eternally; sooner or later, through inadvertence, or in a moment of convivial recklessness, or in a parenthesis of some grand Generality, he would cure her child: or, perhaps, at his rate of talking, would wear out all his idle themes, down to the very “well-being of mankind;” and them Julia's mysterious indisposition would come on the blank tapis. With these secret hopes she presided at the feast, all grace and gentle amity. Julia, too, sat down with a little design, but a very different one, viz., of being chilly company; for she disliked this new acquaintance, and hated the science of medicine.
The unconscious Object chatted away with both, and cut their replies very short, and did strange things: sent away Julia's chicken, regardless of her scorn, and prescribed mutton; called for champagne and made her drink it and pout; and thus excited Mrs. Dodd's hopes that he was attending to the case by degrees.
But after dinner, Julia, to escape medicine universal and particular, turned to her mother, and dilated on treachery of her literary guide, the Criticaster. “It said 'Odds and Ends' was a good novel to read by the seaside. So I thought then oh! how different it must be from most books, if you can sit by the glorious sea and even look at it. So I sent for it directly, and, would you believe, it was an ignoble thing; all flirtations and curates. The sea indeed! A pond would be fitter to read it by; and one with a good many geese on.”
“Was ever such simplicity!” said Mrs. Dodd. “Why, my dear, that phrase about the sea does not mean anything. I shall have you believing that Mr. So-and-So, a novelist, can 'wither fashionable folly,'' and that 'a painful incident'' to one shopkeeper has 'thrown a gloom'' over a whole market-town, and so on. Now-a-days every third phrase is of this character; a starling's note. Once, it appears, there was an age of gold, and then came one of iron, and then of brass. All these are gone, and the age of 'jargon' has succeeded.”
She sighed, and Sampson generalised; he plunged from the seaside novel into the sea of fiction. He rechristened that joyous art Feckshin, and lashed its living professors. “You devour their three volumes greedily,” said he, “but after your meal you feel as empty as a drum; there is no leading idea in 'um; now there always is—in Moliere; and he comprehended the midicine of his age. But what fundamental truth d'our novelists iver convey? All they can do is pile incidents. Their customers dictate th' article: unideaed melodrams for unideaed girls. The writers and their feckshins belong to one species, and that's 'the non-vertebrated animals;' and their midicine is Bosh; why, they bleed still for falls and fevers; and niver mention vital chronometry. Then they don't look straight at Nature, but see with their ears, and repeat one another twelve deep. Now, listen me! there are the cracters for an 'ideaed feckshin' in Barkington, and I'd write it, too, only I haven't time.”
At this, Julia, forgetting her resolution, broke out, “Romantic characters in Barkington? Who? who?”
“Who should they be, but my pashints? Ay, ye may lauch, Miss Julee, but wait till ye see them.” He was then seized with a fit of candour, and admitted that some, even of his pashints, were colourless; indeed, not to mince the matter, six or seven of that sacred band were nullity in person. “I can compare the beggars to nothing,” said he, “but the globules of the Do-Nothings; dee——d insipid, and nothing in 'em. But the others make up. Man alive, I've got 'a rosy-cheeked miser,' and an 'ill-used attorney,' and an 'honest Screw'—he is a gardener, with a head like a cart-horse.”
“Mamma! mamma! that is Mr. Maxley,” cried Julia, clapping her hands, and thawing in her own despite.
“Then there's my virgin martyr and my puppy. They are brother and sister; and there's their father, but he is an impenetrable dog—won't unbosom. Howiver, he sairves to draw chicks for the other two, and so keep 'em goen. By-the-bye, you know my puppy?”
“We have not that honour. Do we know Dr. Sampson's puppy, love?” inquired Mrs. Dodd, rather languidly.
“Mamma!—I—I—know no one of that name.”
“Don't tell me! Why it was he sent me here told me where you lived, and I was to make haste, for Miss Dodd was very ill: it is young Hardie, the banker's son, ye know.”
Mrs. Dodd said good-humouredly, but with a very slight touch of irony, that really they were very much flattered by the interest Mr. Alfred Hardie had shown; especially as her daughter had never exchanged ten words with him. Julia coloured at this statement, the accuracy of which she had good reason to doubt; and the poor girl felt as if an icicle passed swiftly along her back. And then, for the first the in her life, she thought her mother hardly gracious; and she wanted to say she was obliged to Mr. Alfred Hardie, but dared not, and despised herself for not daring. Her composure was further attacked by Mrs. Dodd looking full at her, and saying interrogatively, “I wonder how that young gentleman could know about your being ill?”
At this Julia eyed her plate very attentively, and murmured, “I believe it is all over the town: and seriously too; so Mrs. Maxley says, for she tells me that in Barkington if more than one doctor is sent for, that bodes ill for the patient.”
“Deevelich ill,” cried Sampson heartily.
“For two physicians, like a pair of oars,
Conduck him faster to the Styjjin shores.” *
* Garth.
Julia looked him in the face, and coldly ignored this perversion of Mrs. Maxley's meaning; and Mrs. Dodd returned pertinaciously to the previous topic. “Mr. Alfred Hardie interests
