Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 2Sylvester, Charles Herbert
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Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 2
Sylvester, Charles Herbert
Children's literature; Literature -- Collections
And first she called up all the doctors who give little children so much
physic (they were most of them old ones; for the young ones have learnt
better), and she set them all in a row; and very rueful they looked; for
they knew what was coming.
And first she pulled all their teeth out; and then she bled them all
round; and then she dosed them with calomel, and jalap, and salts and
senna, and brimstone and treacle; and horrible faces they made; and then
she gave them a great emetic of mustard and water, and began all over
again; and that was the way she spent the morning.
And then she called up a whole troop of foolish ladies, who pinch their
children's waists and toes; and she laced them all up in tight stays, so
that they were choked and sick, and their noses grew red, and their
hands and feet swelled; and then she crammed their poor feet into the
most dreadfully tight boots, and made them all dance; and then she asked
them how they liked it; and when they said not at all, she let them go;
because they had only done it out of foolish fashion, fancying it was
for their children's good, as if wasps' waists and pigs' toes could be
pretty, or wholesome, or of any use to anybody.
Then she called up all the careless nursery-maids, and stuck pins into
them all over, and wheeled them about in perambulators with tight straps
across their stomachs and their heads and arms hanging over the side,
till they were quite sick and stupid, and would have had sunstrokes;
but, being under the water, they could only have water-strokes; which, I
assure you, are nearly as bad, as you will find if you try to sit under
a mill wheel. And mind--when you hear a rumbling at the bottom of the
sea, sailors will tell you that it is a ground swell; but now you know
better. It is the old lady wheeling the maids about in perambulators.
And by this time she was so tired, she had to go to luncheon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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