The Recreations of a Country ParsonBoyd, Andrew Kennedy Hutchison
General
The Recreations of a Country Parson
Boyd, Andrew Kennedy Hutchison
Clergy -- Anecdotes; Country life -- England; Rural clergy -- England
It is a curious phase of life that is presented at a Water
Cure establishment. The Water Cure system cannot be carried out
satisfactorily except at an establishment prepared for the purpose.
An expensive array of baths is necessary; so are well-trained bath
servants, and an experienced medical man to watch the process of
cure: the mode of life does not suit the arrangements of a family,
and the listlessness of mind attendant on the water-system quite
unfits a man for any active employment. There must be pure country
air to breathe, a plentiful supply of the best water, abundant means
of taking exercise--Sir E. B. Lytton goes the length of maintaining
that mountains to climb are indispensable;--and to enjoy all these
advantages one must go to a hydropathic establishment. It may
be supposed that many odd people are to be met at such a place;
strong-minded women who have broken through the trammels of the
Faculty, and gone to the Water Cure in spite of the warnings of
their medical men, and their friends' kind predictions that they
would never live to come back; and hypochondriac men, who have tried
all quack remedies in vain, and who have come despairingly to try
one which, before trying it, they probably looked to as the most
violent and perilous of all. And the change of life is total. You
may have finished your bottle of port daily for twenty years, but
at the Water Cure you must perforce practise total abstinence. For
years you may never have tasted fair water, but here you will get
nothing else to drink, and you will have to dispose of your seven
or eight tumblers a day. You may have been accustomed to loll in
bed of a morning till nine or ten o'clock; but here you must imitate
those who would thrive, and 'rise at five:' while the exertion is
compensated by your having to bundle off to your chamber at 9.30 p.
M. You may long at breakfast for your hot tea, and if a Scotchman,
for your grouse pie or devilled kidneys; but you will be obliged
to make up with the simpler refreshment of bread and milk, with the
accompaniment of stewed Normandy pippins. You may have been wont
to spend your days in a fever of business, in a breathless hurry
and worry of engagements to be met and matters to be seen to; but
after a week under the Water Cure, you will find yourself stretched
listlessly upon grassy banks in the summer noon, or sauntering
all day beneath the horse-chestnuts of Sudbrook, with a mind as
free from business cares as if you were numbered among Tennyson's
lotos-eaters, or the denizens of Thomson's Castle of Indolence. And
with God's blessing upon the pure element He has given us in such
abundance, you will shortly (testibus Mr. Lane and Sir E. B. Lytton)
experience other changes as complete, and more agreeable. You will
find that the appetite which no dainty could tempt, now discovers
in the simplest fare a relish unknown since childhood. You will
find the broken rest and the troubled dreams which for years have
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