“I have swallowed the weight of an Apothecary in medicine, and what I am the better for it, except more patient, and less credulous, I know not. I have learnt to bear my infirmities and not to trust to the skill of Physicians for curing them. I endeavour to drink deeply of Philosophy, and to be wise when I cannot be merry, easy when I cannot be glad, content with what cannot be mended, and patient where there be no redress. The mighty can do no more, and the wise seldom do as much.” On October 10 she announces that she and her mother, who had been extremely unwell too, had been advised to drink the Bath waters, and were to be accompanied there by her father. She hopes to see the duchess on her way to Bath, but bids her tell her porter to admit her, as she has grown so thin-- “he will think it is my ghost and shut the door. I shall stay but a few days in town and then proceed with my Father and Mother, to the waters of life and recovery. My Pappa’s chimney ‘hyp’ will never venture to attack him in a public place; it is the sweet companion of solitude and the off-spring of meditation, the disease of an idle imagination, not the child of hurry and diversion. I am afraid that with the gaiety of the place, and the spirits the waters give, I shall be perfect Sal-Volatile, and open my mouth and evaporate.... I was a month at Hatch, where the good humour of the family makes everything agreeable; we had great variety in the house--children in cradles, and old women in elbow chairs. I think the family may be looked upon as the three tenses, the present, past and future.” [Page heading: COTTAGE LIFE] On a fresh scare being caused by the illness of her maid, which the old women of the parish pronounced to be smallpox, Mrs. Robinson sent Elizabeth and Sarah to the cottage of the carpenter hard by without delay, though so late that Elizabeth writes-- “I arrived at my new lodging but the moment before it was time to go to bed, where I slept pretty well, notwithstanding the goodman and his wife snored, the little child cryed, the maid screamed, one little boy had whooping cough, another roared with chilblains. The furniture of our chamber is extraordinary, the ornamental parts as follows:--on the mantelpiece four stone tea-cups, four wineglasses, two broken, two leaden cherubims, a piece of looking-glass, with a ‘beggerly account of empty bottles,’ as Shakespeare calls it, a print of King Charles the Martyr, the woeful ballad of the children in the wood, a pious copy of verses entitled ‘the believer’s gold chain, or good councell for all men,’ with a resplendent brass warming pan, in which my sister is dressing her head to the disadvantage of her complexion, and not much to the rectitude of her head-dress.” The alarm proved to be false as to the nature of the maid’s illness, and they returned the next day to the paternal mansion. [Page heading: EDMUND CURLL]