Was it better to hoe, to mow, to toil and moil amidst the accumulations
of a barnyard; to be the chambermaid of two yoke of oxen and a dozen
cows; to eat salt beef, and earn it with the sweat of my brow, and
thereby take the tough morsel out of some wretch's mouth, into whose
vocation I had thrust myself? Above all, was it better to have a fever
and die blaspheming, as I was like to do?
In this wretched plight, with a furnace in my heart and another in my
head, by the heat of which I was kept constantly at the boiling point,
yet shivering at the bare idea of extruding so much as a finger into
the icy atmosphere of the room, I kept my bed until breakfast-time,
when Hollingsworth knocked at the door, and entered.
"Well, Coverdale," cried he, "you bid fair to make an admirable farmer!
Don't you mean to get up to-day?"
"Neither to-day nor to-morrow," said I hopelessly. "I doubt if I ever
rise again!"
"What is the matter now?" he asked.
I told him my piteous case, and besought him to send me back to town in
a close carriage.
"No, no!" said Hollingsworth with kindly seriousness. "If you are
really sick, we must take care of you."
Accordingly he built a fire in my chamber, and, having little else to
do while the snow lay on the ground, established himself as my nurse. A
doctor was sent for, who, being homaeopathic, gave me as much medicine,
in the course of a fortnight's attendance, as would have laid on the
point of a needle. They fed me on water-gruel, and I speedily became a
skeleton above ground. But, after all, I have many precious
recollections connected with that fit of sickness.
Hollingsworth's more than brotherly attendance gave me inexpressible
comfort. Most men--and certainly I could not always claim to be one of
the exceptions--have a natural indifference, if not an absolutely
hostile feeling, towards those whom disease, or weakness, or calamity
of any kind causes to falter and faint amid the rude jostle of our
selfish existence. The education of Christianity, it is true, the
sympathy of a like experience and the example of women, may soften and,
possibly, subvert this ugly characteristic of our sex; but it is
originally there, and has likewise its analogy in the practice of our
brute brethren, who hunt the sick or disabled member of the herd from
among them, as an enemy. It is for this reason that the stricken deer
goes apart, and the sick lion grimly withdraws himself into his den.