JEROME, K. Jerome

Three men in a boat

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I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch – hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into – some fearful, devastating scourge, I know – and, before I had glanced half down the list of “premonitory symptoms,” it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.

I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever – read the symptoms – discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it – wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus’s Dance – found, as I expected, that I had that too, – began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically – read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright’s disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee.
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Novel Notes

A woman loves him and dies, thirsting for a loving look from him ; child ren’s footsteps creep into his life and steal away again, old faces fade and new ones come and go.

But never a kindly touch of his hand rests on any living thing; never a kindly word comes from his lips; never a kindly thought springs from his heart. And in all his doings fortun e favours him.

The years pass by, and at last there is left to him only one thing that he need fear—a child’s small, wistful face. The child loves him, as the woman, long ago, had loved him, and her eyes follow him with a hungry, beseeching look.

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“ Selfishness is the law of all life. Each thing, from the farthest fixed star to the smallest insect crawling on the earth, fighting for itself according to its strength; and brooding over all, the Eternal, working for Himself: that is the universe . ”

“Have some whisky , ” said MacShaughnassy; “and don’t be so complicatedly metaphysical. You make my head ache.”

“If all action, good and bad, spring from selfishness,” replied Brown, “then there must be good selfishness and bad selfishness: and your bad selfishness is my plain selfishness, without any adjective, so we are back where we started.”

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The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

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I love the fierce strife. I like to watch it. I like to hear of people getting on in it – battling their way bravely and fairly – that is, not slipping through by luck or trickery. It stirs one’s oldSaxon fighting blood like the tales of knights who fought ‘gainst fearful odds’ that thrilled us in our school-boy days.

And fighting the battle of life is fighting against fearful odds, too. There are giants and dragons in this nineteenth century, and the golden casket that they guard is not so easy to win as it appears in the story-books. There, Algernon takes one long, last look at the ancestral hall, dashes the tear-drop from his eye, and goes off – to return in three years’ time, rolling in riches. The authors do not tell us “how it‘s done,” which is a pity, for it would surely prove exciting.

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