l
tale of my getting up in the morning and finding that my right hand had
either forgot its cunning or had turned so lazy that I could not write
with it, and how I sent for a Derby doctor, and how he ordered me up to
London, and how Clark condemned me to three months' idleness and prison
diet--I must admit, of a sufficiently liberal kind. Fuller sees the
sentence carried out in detail. I have had about three days' experience
of it, and I must own that I already feel decidedly better. I think that
after the long vacation I shall be thoroughly well again. In the
meantime, I feel heartily ashamed of myself. I always did consider any
kind of illness or weakness highly immoral, but one must not expect to
be either better or stronger than one's neighbours; and I suppose there
is some degree of truth in what so many people say on Sundays about
their being miserable sinners.' He adds that he is having an exceedingly
pleasant time, which would be still more pleasant if he could write with
his own hand (the letter is dictated). He has 'whole libraries of books'
into which he earnestly desires to look. He feels like a man who has
exchanged dusty boots for comfortable slippers; he is reading Spanish
'with enthusiasm'; longing to learn Italian, to improve his German, and
even to read up his classics. He compares himself to a traveller in
Siberia who, according to one of his favourite anecdotes, loved
raspberries and found himself in a desert entirely covered with his
favourite fruit.

He took the blow gallantly; perhaps rather too lightly. He was, of
course, alarmed at first by the symptoms described. Clark ultimately
decided that, while the loss of power showed the presence of certain
morbid conditions, a careful system of diet might keep at bay for an
indefinite time the danger of the development of a fatal disease.
Fitzjames submitted to the medical directions with perhaps a little
grumbling. He was not, like his father, an ascetic in matters of food.
He had the hearty appetite natural to his vigorous constitution. He was
quite as indifferent as his father to what, in the old phrase, used to
be called 'the pleasures of the table.' He cared absolutely nothing for
the refinements of cookery, and any two vintages were as
indistinguishable to him as two tunes--that is, practically identical.
He cared only for simple food, and I used, in old days, to argue with
him that a contempt for delicacies was as fastidious as a contempt for
pl