Authors, American -- 19th century -- Biography; Leland, Charles Godfrey, 1824-1903
We made soon after a visit to the Rev. Dean and Mrs. Carrington, in
Bocking, Essex. They had a fair daughter, Eva, then quite a girl, who
has since become well known as a writer, and is now the Countess
Cesaresco Martinengro--an Italian name, and not Romany-Gypsy, as its
terminations would seem to indicate. There is in the village of Bocking,
at a corner, a curious and very large grotesque figure of oak, which was
evidently in the time of Elizabeth a pilaster in some house-front. My
friend Edwards, who was wont to roam all over England in a mule-waggon
etching and sketching, when in Bocking was informed by a rustic that this
figure was the image of Harkiles (Hercules), a heathen god formerly
worshipped in the old Catholic convent upon the hill, in the old times!
From London we went in August, 1870, to Brighton, staying at first at the
Albion Hotel. There, under the influence of fresh sea-air, long walks
and drives in all the country round, I began to feel better, yet it was
not for many weeks that I fairly recovered. A chemist named Phillips,
who supplied me with bromide of potass, suggested to me, to his own loss,
that I took a great deal too much. I left it off altogether,
substituting pale ale. Finding this far better, I asked Mr. Phillips if
he could not prepare for me _lupulin_, or the anodyne of hops. He
laughed, and said, "Do you find the result required in ale?" I answered,
"Yes." "And do you like ale?" "Yes." "Then," he answered, "why don't
you _drink_ ale?" And I did, but before I took it up my very vitality
seemed to be well-nigh exhausted with the bromide.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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