was not ill
enough to report myself to the surgeon at his levees, I would call of a
morning upon his steward at the Sign of the Mortar, and beg him to give
me what I wanted; when, without speaking a word, this cadaverous young
man would mix me my potion in a tin cup, and hand it out through the
little opening in his door, like the boxed-up treasurer giving you your
change at the ticket-office of a theatre.

But there was a little shelf against the wall of the door, and upon
this I would set the tin cup for a while, and survey it; for I never
was a Julius Caesar at taking medicine; and to take it in this way,
without a single attempt at dis-guising it; with no counteracting
little morsel to hurry down after it; in short to go to the very
apothecary's in person, and there, at the counter, swallow down your
dose, as if it were a nice mint-julep taken at the bar of a
hotel--_this_ was a bitter bolus indeed. But, then, this pallid young
apothecary charged nothing for it, and _that_ was no small
satisfaction; for is it not remarkable, to say the least, that a shore
apothecary should actually charge you money--round dollars and
cents--for giving you a horrible nausea?

My tin cup would wait a long time on that little shelf; yet "Pills," as
the sailors called him, never heeded my lingering, but in sober, silent
sadness continued pounding his mortar or folding up his powders; until
at last some other customer would appear, and then in a sudden frenzy
of resolution, I would gulp clown my sherry-cobbler, and carry its
unspeakable flavour with me far up into the frigate's main-top. I do
not know whether it was the wide roll of the ship, as felt in that
giddy perch, that occasioned it, but I always got sea-sick after taking
medicine and going aloft with it. Seldom or never did it do me any
lasting good.

Now the Surgeon's steward was only a subordinate of Surgeon Cuticle
himself, who lived in the ward-room among the Lieutenants,
Sailing-master, Chaplain, and Purser.

The Surgeon is, by law, charged with the business of overlooking the
general sanitary affairs of the ship. If anything is going on in any of
its departments which he judges to be detrimental to the healthfulness
of the crew, he has a right to protest against it formally to the
Captain. When a man is being scourged at the gangway, the Surgeon
stands by; and if he thinks that the punishment is becoming more than
the culprit's constitution can well bear, he has a righ