that boy used to get ill about twice a week, so that he couldn’t go to school. There never was such a boy to get ill as that Sandford and Merton. If there was any known disease going within ten miles of him, he had it, and had it badly. He would take bronchitis in the dog days95, and have hay-fever at Christmas; and he would go out in a November fog and come home with sunstroke.
They put him under laughing gas one year, poor fellow, and drew all his teeth, and gave him a false set, because he suffered so terribly with toothache; and then it turned to neuralgia and earache. He was never without a cold, except once for nine weeks while he had scarlet fever96. During the great cholera scare of 1871, our neighborhood was the only one free from it. There was only one case in the whole parish: that case was young Stivvings.
He had to stay in bed when he was ill, and eat chicken and custards; and he would lie there and sob, because they wouldn’t let him do Latin exercises, and took his German grammar away from him.
And we other boys, who would have given ten terms of our school life for being ill for a day couldn’t catch so much as a stiff neck97. We fooled about in draughts, and it did us good, and freshened us up; and we took things to make us sick, and they made us fat, and gave us an appetite. Nothing we could think of seemed to make us ill until the holidays began. Then, on the first day, we caught colds, and severe cough, and all kinds of disorders, which lasted till the term started again; when suddenly we would get well again, and be better than ever.
Such is life; and we are as grass that is cut down, and put into the oven and baked.
To go back to the carved oak question, our great-great-grandfathers must have had very fair notions of the artistic and the beautiful. Why, all our art treasures of today are only the usual items of three or four hundred years ago. I wonder if there is real beauty in the old soup plates, beer mugs, and candle snuffers98 that we prize now, or if it is only the halo of age glowing around them that gives them their charms in our eyes99. The pink shepherds and the yellow shepherdesses that we hand round now for all our friends to admire, and pretend they understand, were the unvalued mantel ornaments100 that the mother of the eighteenth century would have given the baby to suck when he cried.
Will it be the same in the future? Will the prized treasures of today always be the cheap trifles of the day before? Will rows of our willow pattern dinner plates101 be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in the twenty-first century? Will the white cups with the gold rim and the beautiful gold flower inside (species unknown) be carefully mended and dusted only by the lady of the house?
That china dog that ornaments the bedroom of my furnished apartments. It is a white dog. Its eyes are blue. Its nose is a delicate red, with spots. Its head is painfully erect; its expression is nearly imbecile. I do not admire it myself. Considered as a work of art, I may say it irritates me. Thoughtless friends laugh at it, and even my landlady herself has no admiration for it, and excuses its presence by the circumstance that her aunt gave it to her.
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