"I will not take up your time, dear boy, with telling you what is the
matter with me. Life is brief, and you might pass away before I had
finished. But I will tell you what is NOT the matter with me. I have
not got housemaid's knee. Why I have not got housemaid's knee, I cannot
tell you; but the fact remains that I have not got it. Everything else,
however, I HAVE got."
And I told him how I came to discover it all.
Then he opened me and looked down me, and clutched hold of my wrist, and
then he hit me over the chest when I wasn't expecting it - a cowardly
thing to do, I call it - and immediately afterwards butted me with the
side of his head. After that, he sat down and wrote out a prescription,
and folded it up and gave it me, and I put it in my pocket and went out.
I did not open it. I took it to the nearest chemist's, and handed it in.
The man read it, and then handed it back.
He said he didn't keep it.
I said:
"You are a chemist?"
He said:
"I am a chemist. If I was a co-operative stores and family hotel
combined, I might be able to oblige you. Being only a chemist hampers
me."
I read the prescription. It ran:
"1 lb. beefsteak, with
1 pt. bitter beer
every 6 hours.
1 ten-mile walk every morning.
1 bed at 11 sharp every night.
And don't stuff up your head with things you don't understand."
I followed the directions, with the happy result - speaking for myself -
that my life was preserved, and is still going on.
In the present instance, going back to the liver-pill circular, I had the
symptoms, beyond all mistake, the chief among them being "a general
disinclination to work of any kind."
What I suffer in that way no tongue can tell. From my earliest infancy I
have been a martyr to it. As a boy, the disease hardly ever left me for
a day. They did not know, then, that it was my liver. Medical science
was in a far less advanced state than now, and they used to put it down
to laziness.
"Why, you skulking little devil, you," they would say, "get up and do
something for your living, can't you?" - not knowing, of course, that I
was ill.
And they didn't give me pills; they gave me clumps on the side of the
head. And, strange as it may appear, those clumps on the head often
cured me - for the time being. I have known one clump on the head have
more effect upon my liver, and make me feel more anxious to go straight
away then and there, and do what was wanted to be done, without further
loss of time, than a whole box of pills does now.
