"Well, my man! I'm in a hurry, so you'll have to walk pretty fast
if you keep alongside of me. Do you know who I am?"
"Yes, I think. Physician Vilbert?"
"Ah--I'm known everywhere, I see! That comes of being a public
benefactor."
Vilbert was an itinerant quack-doctor, well known to the rustic
population, and absolutely unknown to anybody else, as he, indeed,
took care to be, to avoid inconvenient investigations. Cottagers
formed his only patients, and his Wessex-wide repute was among them
alone. His position was humbler and his field more obscure than
those of the quacks with capital and an organized system of
advertising. He was, in fact, a survival. The distances he
traversed on foot were enormous, and extended nearly the whole length
and breadth of Wessex. Jude had one day seen him selling a pot of
coloured lard to an old woman as a certain cure for a bad leg, the
woman arranging to pay a guinea, in instalments of a shilling a
fortnight, for the precious salve, which, according to the physician,
could only be obtained from a particular animal which grazed on
Mount Sinai, and was to be captured only at great risk to life and
limb. Jude, though he already had his doubts about this gentleman's
medicines, felt him to be unquestionably a travelled personage, and
one who might be a trustworthy source of information on matters not
strictly professional.
"I s'pose you've been to Christminster, Physician?"
"I have--many times," replied the long thin man. "That's one of my
centres."
"It's a wonderful city for scholarship and religion?"
"You'd say so, my boy, if you'd seen it. Why, the very sons of the
old women who do the washing of the colleges can talk in Latin--not
good Latin, that I admit, as a critic: dog-Latin--cat-Latin, as we
used to call it in my undergraduate days."
"And Greek?"
"Well--that's more for the men who are in training for bishops, that
they may be able to read the New Testament in the original."
"I want to learn Latin and Greek myself."
"A lofty desire. You must get a grammar of each tongue."
"I mean to go to Christminster some day."
"Whenever you do, you say that Physician Vilbert is the only
proprietor of those celebrated pills that infallibly cure all
disorders of the alimentary system, as well as asthma and shortness
of breath. Two and threepence a box--specially licensed by the
government stamp."
"Can you get me the grammars if I promise to say it hereabout?"