which, unavoidably, I was making myself a party. Lady Carbery had, at
first, directed towards me occasional glances, expressing a comic
sympathy with the thoughts which she supposed to be occupying my mind.
But these glances ceased; and I was recalled by the gloomy sadness in
her altered countenance to some sense of my own extravagant and
disproportionate frenzy on this occasion: from the indulgent kindness
with which she honored me, her countenance on this occasion became a
mirror to my own. At night she assured me, when talking over the case,
that she had never witnessed an expression of such settled misery, and
also (so she fancied) of misanthropy, as that which darkened my
countenance in those moments of apparent public triumph, no matter how
trivial the occasion, and amidst an uproar of friendly felicitation. I
look back to that state of mind as almost a criminal reproach to
myself, if it were not for the facts of the case. But, in excuse for
myself, this fact, above all others, ought to be mentioned--that, over
and above the killing oppression to my too sensitive system of the
monotonous school tasks, and the ruinous want of exercise, I had fallen
under medical advice the most misleading that it is possible to
imagine. The physician and the surgeon of my family were men too
eminent, it seemed to me, and, consequently, with time too notoriously
bearing a high pecuniary value, for any school-boy to detain them with
complaints. Under these circumstances, I threw myself for aid, in a
case so simple that any clever boy in a druggist's shop would have
known how to treat it, upon the advice of an old, old apothecary, who
had full authority from my guardians to run up a most furious account
against me for medicine. This being the regular mode of payment,
inevitably, and unconsciously, he was biased to a mode of treatment;
namely, by drastic medicines varied without end, which fearfully
exasperated the complaint. This complaint, as I now know, was the
simplest possible derangement of the liver, a torpor in its action that