against his innumerable troubles. The first is the luxury of twisting his
nose on one side, and stopping up his air-passages and Eustachian tubes
with inconceivably large quantities of strong snuff. The second is the
oleaginous gratification of incessantly anointing his miserable little
beard and mustachios with cheap bear's-grease, which always turns rancid
on the premises before he has half done with it. When Mr. Jeremy gives a
party in the Bachelor Bedroom, his guests have the unexpected pleasure
of seeing him take his physic, and hearing him describe his maladies
and recount his accidents. In other respects, the moral influence of the
Bedroom over the characters of those who occupy it, which exhibits Mr.
Bigg in the unexpected literary aspect of a commentator on Junius, is
found to tempt Mr. Jeremy into betraying a horrible triumph and interest
in the maladies of others, of which nobody would suspect him in the
general society of the house.
"I noticed you, after dinner to-day," says this invalid bachelor, on such
occasions, to any one of the Bedroom guests who may be rash enough to
complain of the slightest uneasiness in his presence; "I saw the corners
of your mouth get green, and the whites of your eyes look yellow. You
have got a pain here," says Mr. Jeremy, gaily indicating the place to
which he refers on his own shattered frame, with an appearance of extreme
relish--"a pain _here_, and a sensation like having a cannon-ball inside
you, _there_. You will be parched with thirst and racked with fidgets
all to-night; and to-morrow morning you will get up with a splitting
headache, and a dark-brown tongue, and another cannon-ball in your inside.
My dear fellow, I'm a veteran at this sort of thing; and I know exactly
the state you will be in next week, and the week after, and when you will
have to try the sea-side, and how many pounds' weight you will lose to
a dead certainty, before you can expect to get over this attack. Suppose
we look under his ribs, on the right side of him?" continues Mr. Jeremy,
addressing himself confidentially to the company in general. "I'll lay
anybody five to one we find an alarming lump under the skin. And that lump
will be his liver!"
Thus, while Mr. Bigg always astonishes the Bedroom guests on the subject
of Junius, Mr. Jeremy always alarms them on the subject of themselves.
Mr. Smart, the next, and third bachelor, placed in a similar situation,
displays himself under a more agreeable aspect, and makes the society that
surrounds him, for the night at least, supremely happy.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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