Narrative and Miscellaneous PapersDe Quincey, Thomas
General
Narrative and Miscellaneous Papers
De Quincey, Thomas
English essays; English fiction
thrown upon the irritating necessity of repeating it more frequently
than would seem credible, if stated. At this time, I used always hot
water; and a thought occurred to me very seriously that it would be best
to live constantly, and, perhaps, to sleep in a bath. What caused me to
renounce this plan, was an accident that compelled me for one day to use
cold water. This, first of all, communicated any lasting warmth; so that
ever afterwards I used none _but_ cold water. Now, to live in a _cold_
bath, in our climate, and in my own state of preternatural sensibility
to cold, was not an idea to dally with. I wish to mention, however, for
the information of other sufferers in the same way, one change in the
mode of applying the water, which led to a considerable and a sudden
improvement in the condition of my feelings. I had endeavored to procure
a child's battledore, as an easy means (when clothed with sponge) of
reaching the interspace between the shoulders; which interspace, by the
way, is a sort of Bokhara, so provokingly situated, that it will neither
suffer itself to be reached from the north, in which direction even the
Czar, with his long arms, has only singed his own fingers, and lost six
thousand camels; nor at all better from the south, upon which line
of approach the greatest potentate in Southern Asia, viz., No.--, in
Leadenhall Street, has found it the best policy to pocket the little
Khan's murderous defiances and persevering insults. There is no
battledore long enough to reach him in either way. In my own difficulty,
I felt almost as perplexed as the Honorable East India Company, when I
found that no battledore was to be had; for no town was near at hand.
In default of a battledore, therefore, my necessity threw my experiment
upon a long hair-brush; and this, eventually, proved of much greater
service than any sponge or any battledore; for, the friction of the
brush caused an irritation on the surface of the skin, which, more than
anything else, has gradually diminished the once continual misery of
unrelenting frost; although even yet it renews itself most distressingly
at uncertain intervals.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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