A JOURNEY TO NATURE 



morning, and ought to be kept on milk and 

 apples. 



Then I got a very edifying lecture on heart 

 disease, that I cannot remember, for it was 

 studded all over with technical names that stood 

 out like the brass nails on a hair trunk, but it 

 left a rather satisfactory impression on my mind 

 that the heart was a gay deceiver and played more 

 pranks with a man than any other organ, if it 

 once succeeded in attracting attention to itself. 

 The only way to treat it was with respectful dis 

 dain as not belonging to one s conscious set. 



The Doctor was one of those physicians who 

 radiate health instead of prescribing it. He said 

 once that he got his diploma from Nature, and 

 had been forty years matriculating. But he had 

 the document of his human Alma Mater framed 

 and hung up in his study, all the same, and I 

 could afford to take his hyperboles with good 

 humour, as when he said that six out of ten sick 

 men would acquire health if they could only be 

 restored to primitive ignorance ; they knew too 

 much to be normal. 



Absurd as all this was, it nevertheless had a 

 reviving effect that was inscrutable, like a smell 

 of terebinth. The Doctor exuded balm of Gilead 

 in his talk. It was always an exaggerated and 

 lusty kind of assertion that struck you like the 

 afflatus of the pine woods when the west wind 

 blows. It was as if he had more health himself 

 than he knew what to do with, and so shed it in 

 his conversation. 



152 



