Therefore, while at Bartram, I should dispose of my time quite as I
pleased, and the more I plundered the garden and gipsied in the woodlands,
the better.
Then he told me what a miserable invalid he was, and how the doctors
interfered with his frugal tastes. A glass of beer and a mutton chop--his
ideal of a dinner--he dared not touch. They made him drink light wines,
which he detested, and live upon those artificial abominations all liking
for which vanishes with youth.
There stood on a side-table, in its silver coaster, a long-necked Rhenish
bottle, and beside it a thin pink glass, and he quivered his fingers in a
peevish way toward them.
But unless he found himself better very soon, he would take his case into
his own hands, and try the dietary to which nature pointed.
He waved his fingers toward his bookcases, and told me his books were
altogether at my service during my stay; but this promise ended, I must
confess, disappointingly. At last, remarking that I must be fatigued, he
rose, and kissed me with a solemn tenderness, placed his hand upon what I
now perceived to be a large Bible, with two broad silk markers, red and
gold, folded in it--the one, I might conjecture, indicating the place in
the Old, the other in the New Testament.
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