This is the genuine old-fashioned way, dating from a very early year after the worlds creation. In fact, it seems evident from the discovery of bone spoons, roughly fashioned, in caverns, that some of the cave-dwellers practised it, the preparation used for nurturing the very early baby being most probably marrow out of an aurochs leg-bone, or, maybe, the brains of the megatherium, which may account for the wisdom that has come down from our ancestors, who knew everything, while we are ignorant in the extreme.
Now we have changed all that, as the French say, and the very modern babe is supplied with somebodys patent infants food, out of which everything noxious has been eliminated. Such preparations are advertised by the dozen, and when cooked there is no more old-fashioned spoon, but the food is placed in a peculiarly shaped bottle fitted with hose and branch like a small fire-engine, from the indiarubber tube of which baby imbibes health very seldom. For what with neglect in cleaning the apparatus, putrescent particles of milk, fermenting yeasty paste, and the like, the infant becomes an infant prodigy if it manages to escape the many disorders incidental to early childhood, and can be exhibited as a specimen brought up by the bottle, which slays as many as that effected by people of larger growth.
No unwashed feeding-bottle slew the Reverend Henry Lambent, for your modern hookah-pattern food imbiber had not been invented when he was born. He was reared as aforesaid, honestly by hand, but his nurse must have made a mistake in the packets from which she obtained his supplies, and in place of biscuit, ground arrowroot, or semolina, have gone in the dark and used the starch with an effect that lasted even unto manhood.
Stiffness is a mild way of expressing the rigidity of the Vicars person. Rude boys made remarks about him, suggesting that he had swallowed the poker, that he was as stiff as a yard of pump-water, and the like. Certainly he seemed to have come of an extremely stiff-necked generation, as he stalked he never used to walk down the High Street towards the schools.
The Reverend Henry Lambent had been taking seidlitz powders every morning since the school feast. Not that he had feasted and made himself ill, for his refreshment on that day had consisted of one cup of tea and a slice of bread-and-butter that was all at the feast; but since then he had been nervous, hot-blooded, and strange. He had had symptoms of the ailment before the day of the school-treat, but they had been more mild; now they had assumed an aggravated form, and the seidlitz powders brought him no relief.
And yet he had tried them well, telling himself that he was only a little feverish, and had been studying a little too hard. He had taken a seidlitz powder according to the direction for use as printed upon the square, flat box that is to say, he had mixed the contents of the blue paper in a tumbler of cold spring water, waited till it dissolved, then emptied in the contents of the white paper, stirred, and drunk while in a state of effervescence. He had dissolved the contents of the blue paper in one glass of water and the contents of the white paper in another glass of water, poured one into the other, and drunk while in a state of effervescence. He had dissolved the contents of the papers again separately, and drunk first one and then the other, allowing the effervescence to take place not in the tumbler. Still he was no better, and he almost felt tempted to follow the example of the Eastern potentate who took the whole of the contents of the blue papers first, and then swallowed the contents of all the white papers afterwards; but history tells that this monarch did not feel any better after the dose, so that the Reverend Henry Lambent was not encouraged to proceed.
He was not seriously bad, and yet he was, if this paradoxical statement can be accepted. He was mentally ill for the first time in his life of the complaint from which he suffered, and he was trying hard to make himself believe that his ailment was bodily and of a nervo-febrile cast.
The Reverend Henry Lambents attack came on with the visible appearance of a face before his eyes. If he sat down to read, it gazed up at him from the book, like a beautiful illustration that filled every page. He turned over, and it was there; he turned over again, and it was still there. Leaf after leaf did he keep turning, and it was always before him.
He set to work at his next weeks sermons, and the manuscript paper became illustrated as well with the same sweet pensive face, and when he read
prayers morning and evening, it seemed to him that he was making supplication for that face alone. He preached on Sundays, and the congregation seemed to consist of one the owner of that face, and to her he addressed himself morning and afternoon. If he sat and thought it was of that face; if he went out for a constitutional, that face was with him; and when at least a dozen times he set off, as he felt in duty bound, to visit the schools, he turned off in another direction he dared not go for fear of meeting the owner of that face.