as full of crazes as of learning.
One of these crazes was astronomy, and another was mud-baths, and another
was open windows and long walks in the open air, and another was
skin-diseases and nervous disorders, and another was the Lost Tribes, and
another was Woman's Education; with the Second Advent and Vegetable Diet
to fill up the spaces. Some of these he had picked up at Oxford, and
others in his travels abroad, especially in Moravia: but the sum total was
that you'd call him a crank. Coming by chance into Cornwall, he had taken
an uncommon fancy to our climate and its 'humidity'--that was the word.
There was nothing like it (he said) for the skin--leastways, if taken
along with mud-baths. He had bought half a dozen acres of land at the
head of the creek, a mile above Merry-Garden, and built a whacking great
house upon it, full of bathrooms and adorned upon the outside with statues
in baked earth to represent Trigonometry and the other heathen gods.
He had given the contract to an up-country builder, and brought the
material (which was mainly brick and Bath-stone) from the Lord knows
where; but it was delivered up the creek by barges. There were days, in
the year before William John's death, when these barges used to sail up
past Merry-Garden at high springs in procession without end. But now the
house had been standing furnished for three good years, with fruit-gardens
planted on the slopes below it, and basins full of gold-fish: and there
Dr. Clatworthy lived with half a score of male patients as mad as himself.
For, though rich, he didn't spend his money in enjoyment only, but charged
his guests six guineas a week, while he taught 'em the secret of perfect
health.

Well, you may laugh at the man, but I've heard my mother (who remembers
him) say that, with all his faults, he had the complexion of a baby.
She would describe him as an unmarried man, of the age of fifty,--he had a
prejudice against marrying under fifty,--dressed in nankeen for all
weathers, with no other protection than a whalebone umbrella, and likewise
remarkable for a fine Roman nose. 'Twas this Clatworthy, by the way, that
a discharged gardener advised to go down to Merry-Garden and make a second
fortune by picking cherries, "for," said he, "having such a nose as yours
you can hook on to a bough with it and pick with both hands." I don't
myself believe that he came to visit Merry-Garden on any such
recommendation; but visit it he did, and of