Mrs. Rocket accordingly did not like me, and
was always trying to get me out. Between these two contending powers
above, and the butcher, the baker, and candlestick-maker below, I was
neither solitary nor idle.
There was much to do, moreover, in answering the kind inquiries, and
receiving and disposing of the whips, jellies, _blanc-mangers_, and
other indigestible delicacies, sent in by anxious friends. These the
grateful Doctor pronounced, in the privacy of domestic life, "poison for
the patient, but not quite so bad for the attendants." Accordingly, we
ate them together sociably, at almost every meal; after which we went up
stairs and told "the patient" how good they were, while I presented her
gruel, and he would ask her, with an earnest air of judicial and
dispassionate investigation, whether that was not "nice." This conduct
she declared most unfeeling and ungrateful in us both, and bound herself
by many a vow to make us pay for it as soon as she had the ordering of
our dinners again. So we all made merry together over the little cradle
that was called "the pill-box." Its small tenant was from the first, as
I have hinted, a virtuous child, cried little, slept much, and when
awake rewarded our attentions by making such preposterous faces as
rendered it a most grateful task to watch him.
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