I hardly know how to continue this portion of the history, and feel a great temptation to make a leap at once to its close. Who cares to read of the daily life of a sick-chamber? There is so little variation in it: there was so little in hers. Adeline better or worse; the visits of the doctors, and their opinions; a change in her medicine, pills for mixture, or mixture for pills; and there you have about the whole history. Which medicine, by the way, was ordered by the English physician. A French one never gives any. He would not prescribe one dose, where the English would choke you with five hundred. It is true. Pills, powders, mixture; mixture, powders, pills: five hundred at the very least, where a Frenchman would give none. Warm baths and fasting in abundance they order, but no medicine. They are uncommonly free with the lancet, however; with leeches; with anything else that draws blood. The first year Eleanor Seymour (if you have not forgotten her) was at school at Madame de Nino's, an illness broke out amidst the pupils, and the school medical attendant was sent for. It was this very Dr. Dorré, now attending Adeline de Castella. Five or six of the younger girls seemed heavy and feverish, and there were signs of an eruption on the skin. Monsieur le docteur thought it would turn out to be measles or scarlatina, he could not yet pronounce which; and he ordered them to bed and to take a few quarts of eau sucrée: he then sent for the rest of the pupils one by one, and bled them all round.[1] "A simple measure of precaution," he said to Madame. ------------------------------- [1] A fact, in all its details. ------------------------------- If this history of the sick-chamber is to be continued, we must borrow some extracts from the diary of Mary Carr. A good thing she kept one: otherwise there would have been little record of this earlier period in the closing scenes of life. Meanwhile it may be as well to mention that a sort of wild wish--in its fervour it could be called little else--had taken hold of Adeline: she wanted to return to Belport. Every one at first opposed it. The cold would be greater in the seaport town than it was at Beaufoy; and the journey might do her harm. There appeared to be only one consideration in its favour; but that was a strong one: they would be on the spot with the doctors. She seemed to get better and stronger. Signor de Castella came home and was astonished at the improvement. Perhaps it was what he had not looked for. Extract From The Diary Of Mary Carr. _Nov. 3rd_.--What can make her so anxious to return to Belport? She is growing feverish about it, and the Signor and Madame see that she is. Rose has been offering to bet me a pair of gloves that it will end in our going. I hope it will. This house seems to be dedicated to illness. Madame de Beaufoy does not improve, and one of the servants has taken gastric fever.