and _of and concerning sympathies and antipathies_, are perhaps as well
worth noting for future use, as some of those by which Sir Kenelm Digby and
others astonished their own generation, and which they bequeathed to
ungrateful posterity.



CHAPTER II.

My mother, who had a great, and perhaps not altogether a mistaken,
opinion, of the sovereign efficacy of the touch of gold in certain cases,
tried it repeatedly on the hand of the physician who attended me, and who,
in consequence of this application, had promised my cure; but that not
speedily taking place, and my mother, naturally impatient, beginning to
doubt his skill, she determined to rely on her own. On Sir Kenelm Digby's
principle of curing wounds, by anointing the weapon with which the wound
had been inflicted, she resolved to try what could be done with the Jew,
who had been the original cause of my malady, and to whose malignant
influence its continuance might be reasonably ascribed; accordingly one
evening, at the accustomed hour when Simon the old-clothes-man's cry was
heard coming down the street, I being at that time seized with my usual fit
of nerves, and my mother being at her toilette crowning herself with roses
to go to a ball, she ordered the man to be summoned into the housekeeper's
room, and, through the intervention of the housekeeper, the application was
made on the Jew's hand; and it was finally agreed that the same should be
renewed every twelvemonth, upon condition that he, the said Simon, should
never more be seen or heard under our windows or in our square. My evening
attack of nerves intermitted, as the signal for its coming on, ceased. For
some time I slept quietly: it was but a short interval of peace. Simon,
meanwhile, told his part of the story to his compeers, and the fame of his