tic. I don't know what they were, and I don't
want to know. Devil's elixirs were they all. Rubbub and
magnesia,--endless imprecations rest upon that obnoxious red mixture!
And chiefest of them all--Arimanes of the whole bad crew, though Agag is
the only really suitable royal name I can think of--is that slow, greasy
horror, whose superhuman excess of unutterable abomination no words can
express, and even inarticulate ejaculations made on purpose cannot at
all show forth,--as urk! huk! agh!--chiefest among them all, castor oil!

I hurry away from the awful scene. Let me be thankful that I swallowed
but little calomel. Let me be thankful that, after a time, I could not
swallow castor oil. Spasmodic regurgitations, as if one had attempted to
load a gun having a live coal at the far end, closed perforce that
chapter of torments. And soon thereafter arose the benign genius of
homoeopathy, with healing in its neat little white-paper wings.
Beautiful Homoeopathy, the real Angel in the House, if Mr. Coventry
Patmore had only known it! Hast thou not long ago appeared, veiled in an
allegory, before an unrecognizing world? Surely, what but homoeopathic
medicine was that wondrous talisman with which Adonbec El Hakim cured
the Melech Ric? To be taken in a tumbler about two thirds full of water,
as now; but in those early times, and for such a very large man, at one
gulp, instead of by hourly teaspoonfuls. Or perhaps the manuscripts may
have been corrupted in that passage by unscrupulous mediaeval physicians
of the school of Salerno, or other regular institutions.

I suppose I must have played a good deal; but there are reasons why this
may not have been the case. The chief of them is, that whereas I have
subsequently commonly attained a fair degree of excellence in what I
have learned, I did not in the staple games of my childhood do so. In
marbles, spinning top, and ball I was inferior,--indeed, scarcely at
home in the technics of some of them. The games of marbles which I see
now-a-days seem to centre upon the projection of the missile into a hole
in the ground. In my day we used to play upon the surface of the earth;
sometimes "in the big ring," where each combatant fired at the marbles
grouped in the centre, from any point upon the external orbit;
sometimes "in the little ring," where the shot was made from the place
where the projectile lodged last; sometimes "at chasings," where the
players fired alternately, each at the marbl