Corporal Sam and Other StoriesQuiller-Couch, Arthur
General
Corporal Sam and Other Stories
Quiller-Couch, Arthur
Short stories, English
So the waiter's verdict, after all, sounded much the same as Miss
Lapenotiere's. And the conclusion seems to be that you can not only
say the same thing in different ways, but quite different things in
identical words.
DOCTOR UNONIUS.
CHAPTER I.
'In all his life he never engaged in a law suit. Reader, try if you
can go so far and be so good a man.'
Thus concludes the epitaph of Doctor Unonius, upon a modest stone in
the churchyard of Polpeor, in Cornwall, of which parish he was,
during his life, the general friend, as his scientific reputation now
abides its boast.
To those who knew him in life there is a gentle irony in the thought
that while, during life, his scientific attainments earned him
nothing but neglect, their recognition grows now proportionately as
the man himself, his face and habit, the spruce black suit he wore,
and the thousand small acts of kindness he did, fade out of memory.
'Your late eminent fellow-parishioner, now these forty years with
God,'--so the Bishop of the Diocese spoke the other day before
unveiling a stained-glass window to that memory in Polpeor Church.
The Bishop, you see, spoke of eternal life in terms of time--a habit
with us all. If anything could be more certain than that, in
whatever bliss Doctor Unonius now inherits, forty years--or a
thousand for that matter--count as one day, it is that throughout his
life he detested stained-glass. Through this very window, indeed,
now obscured _ad majorem gloriam Dei et in memoriam Johannis Unonii
medicinae doctoris_, he loved--for it faced his pew--to watch during
sermon-time the blue sky, the clouds, the rooks at their business in
the churchyard elms. He has even recorded (in an essay on 'Visions'
read before the Tregantick Literary and Scientific Society in the
winter session of 1856) that once, awaking with a start in the middle
of Parson Grylls's sermon, he distinctly saw suspended in these same
elm-tops the image of an abnormally long pilot-fish (_naucretes
ductor_) he had received from a fishing-boat overnight and left at
home in his surgery mounted upon an apparatus of his own invention,
ready to be sketched before dissection. _Piscium et summa genus
haesit ulmo_ . . . for twenty seconds, rubbing his eyes, he stared at
the apparition as it very slowly faded.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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