CHAPTER V. The true meaning of the word Podagra.
Let the reader judge of my transport, when my
elegant new barouche and splendid pair of horses,
that cost me a thousand dollars, drew up before my
house in Chestnut-street. I stood upon the kerbstone
and surveyed it from top to bottom. The
marble of the steps, basement, and window-sills
was white as snow, and the bricks were redder
than roses. The windows were of plate glass, and
within them were curtains of crimson damask,
fronted with hangings of white lace, as fine and
lovely as a bride's veil of true Paris blonde; and
a great bouquet of dahlias, wreathed around a
-- 095 --
[figure description] Page 095.[end figure description]
blooming rose, glittered in each. It was evidently
the house of a man of wealth and figure.
The neighbourhood, it was equally manifest,
was of the highest vogue and distinction: on one
side was the dwelling of a fashionable tailor, who
built a house out of every ten coats that he cut;
on the other side was the residence of a retired
tavern-keeper; and right opposite, on the other
side of the street, was the mansion of one of the
first aristocrats in the town, who had had neither a
tailor nor a tavern-keeper in the family for a space
of three full generations. There was no end to
the genteel people in my neighbourhood; here
was the house of a firstrate lawyer, there of a
shop-keeper who had not sold any thing by retail
for ten years; here a Cræsus of a carpenter who
turned up his nose at the aristocrat, and there a
Plutus of a note-shaver who looked with contempt
on the gentleman of chips. In short, my house
was in a highly fashionable neighbourhood; and I
felt, as I mounted my marble steps, that Jack Higginson,
the brewer (as my brother Tim always
called me), was as genteel a fellow among them as
you would find of a summer's day.
I entered the house as proud as Lucifer, telling
my friends that they should crack a bottle or two
of my best port; for Tim had given me a hint
that my cellar contained some of the best in the
world. “And,” said Tim, giving me a wink,
“we may take our fun now, as sister Margaret—”
at that name I felt a cold creeping in my bones—
-- 096 --
[figure description] Page 096.[end figure description]
“as sister Margaret is still in the country.” The
ague left me—“I did not think it,” he continued,
“worth while to alarm her.”
“The Lord be thanked!” said I; though why I
said it, I knew no more than the man in the moon.
We sat down, we drank, and we made merry—
that is to say, they made merry: as for myself, a
circumstance occurred which nipped my pleasure
in the bud, and began to make me doubt whether,
in exchanging the condition of Sheppard Lee for
that of John H. Higginson, I had not made some-what
of a bad bargain.
I had managed, somehow or other, in the course
of the night, to stump my toe, or wrench my foot;
and, though the accident caused me but little inconvenience
at the time, the member had begun gradually
to feel uneasy; and now, as I sat at my
table, it grew so painful that I was forced to draw
off my boot. But this giving me little relief, and
finding that my foot was swollen out of all shape
and beauty, my brother Tim pronounced it a severe
strain, and recommended that I should call in my
family physician, Dr. Boneset, a very illustrious
man, and fine fellow, who at that moment chanced
to drive by in his coal-black gig, which looked, as
physicians' gigs usually look, as if in mourning for
a thousand departed patients.
“What's the matter?” said the doctor.
“Why, doctor,” said I, “I have given my foot
a confounded wrench; I scarce know how; but it
is as big and as hot as a plum-pudding.”
-- 097 --
[figure description] Page 097.[end figure description]
“Hum, ay!—very unlucky,” said the doctor:
“off with your stocking, and let me look at your
tongue. Pulse quite feverish. Fine port!” he
said, drinking off a glass that Tim had poured him,
and cocking his eye like one who means to be
witty, “fine port, sir; but one can't float in it for
ever without paying port-charges. A very gentlemanly
disease, at all events. It lies between port
and porter.”
“Port and porter! disease!” said I, slipping off
my stocking as he directed, without well knowing
what he meant. My foot was as red as a salamander,
swelled beyond all expression, and, while
I drew the stocking, it hurt me most horribly.
“Zounds doctor!” said I, “can that be a
wrench?”
“No,” said the doctor, “it's the wrencher—genuine
podagra, 'pon honour.”
“Podagra!” said I; “Podagra!” said Tim; and
“Podagra!” said the others. “What's that?”
“Gout!” said the doctor.
“Gout!” cried my friends; “Gout!!” roared
my brother Tim; and “Gout!!!” yelled I, starting
from the doctor as if from an imp of darkness
who had just come to make claim to me. It was
the unluckiest leap in the world; I kicked over a
chair as I started, and the touch was as if I had
clapped my foot into the jaws of a roaring lion.
Crunch went every bone; crack went every sinew;
and such a yell as I set up was never before heard
in Chestnut-street.
-- 098 --
[figure description] Page 098.[end figure description]
“You see, gentlemen—(I'll take another glass
of that port, Mr. Doolittle)—you see what we must
all come to! This is one of the small penalties
one must pay for being a gentleman; when one
dances, one must pay the piper. Now would my
friend Higginson there give a whole year of his
best brewing, that all the pale ale and purple port
that have passed his lips had been nothing better
than elder-wine and bonny-clabber. But never
mind, my dear sir,” said the son of Æsculapius,
with a coolness that shocked me; “as long as it's
only in your foot, it's a small matter.”
“A small matter!”—I grinned at him; but the
unfeeling wretch only repeated his words—“A
small matter!”
I had never been sick before in my life. As
John H. Higginson, my worst complaints had been
only an occasional surfeit, or a moderate attack of
booziness; and as Sheppard Lee, I had never
known any disease except laziness, which, being
chronic, I had grown so accustomed to that it
never troubled me. But now, ah, now! my first
step into the world of enjoyment was to be made
on red-hot ploughshares and pokers; my first hour
of a life of content was to be passed in grinning, and
groaning, and—but it is hardly worth while to say it.
The gout should be confined to religious people;
for men of the world will swear, and that roundly.
For six days—six mortal days—did I lay upon
my back, enduring such horrible twitches and
twinges in my foot, that I was more than once on
-- 099 --
[figure description] Page 099.[end figure description]
the point of ordering the doctor to cut it off; and I
do not know how far that conceit might have gone,
had not the heartless fellow, who, I believe, was
all the while making game of my torments, assured
me that the only effect of the dismemberment
would be to drive the enemy into the other foot,
where it would play the same tricks over again.
“The gout,” said he, “has as great an affection
for the human body as a cat has for a house in
which she has been well treated. When it once
effects a lodgment, and feels itself comfortable—”
“Comfortable!” said I, with a groan.
“In good easy quarters—”
“Don't talk to me of easy quarters,” said I; “for
if I were hacked into quarters, and that by the clumsiest
butcher in the town, I could not be more uneasy
in every quarter.”
“I am talking,” said Dr. Boneset, “not of you,
but of the disease; and what I meant to say was,
that when it once finds itself at home, in a good
wholesome corporation of a man, there you may
expect to find it a tenant for life.”
“For life!” said I. “I am the most wretched
man in existence. Oh, Sheppard Lee! Sheppard
Lee! what a fool were you to think yourself miserable!
—Doctor, I shall go mad!”
“Not while you have the gout,” said he; “'tis
a sovereign protection against all that.—But let us
look at your foot.” And the awkward or malicious
creature managed to drop a tortoise and gold snuff-box,
of about a pound and a half weight, which he
-- 100 -- p016-109
[figure description] Page 100.[end figure description]
was always sporting, right upon the point of my
great toe, while he was looking at it. Had it been
a ton and a half instead of a pound and a half in
weight, it could not have thrown me into greater
torture; and the—the man!—he thought he had
settled the matter by making me a handsome apology!
He left me to endure my pangs, and to curse
Squire Higginson's father, grandfather, great-grandfather,
and, in general, all his forefathers, who had
entailed such susceptible great toes upon the family.
In a word, I was in such a horrible quandary,
that I wished the devil would fly off with my new
body, as he had done before with the old.
Bird, Robert Montgomery, 1806-1854 [1836], Sheppard Lee, volume 1 (Harper & Brothers, New York) [word count] [eaf016v1].
