So I took her to see an oculist.
We arrived with commendable punctuality, and were ushered by an obse- quious menial into the impressive gloom of the waiting room, where six others were already patiently waiting.
On our entry all eyes were turned in our direction—all, that is, save the sky blue organ in the left socket of the tall man third from,the right. This main- tained its steadfast regard of the ceiling with an impassivity that caused one to suspect it spent its nights in the glass on the washstand along with the false teeth.
We seated ourselves with what assurance we could muster under the circum- stances, though I must confess to a sudden tightening of the collar when I dis- covered the small boy with the alternating squint in the act of "changing eyes"
while fixing the end of my nose.
The voice of the menial upraised.
The silence was unbroken.
Suddenly it was rudely shattered by the voice of the menial upraised in a demand for
"Mr. Jinks."
The tall man third from the right started convulsively, with the immediate effect of causing his left eye to spring smartly into the fireplace, whence it was retrieved by the small boy, and returned to its owner with the graceful remark,
"Your eye, sir, I fancy." The silence was once more unbroken. , 't
It was our turn next, and, proudly answer- ing to the name which has run not a few times through the echoing arches of the temple of fame, we rose at the menial's gentle bellow of
"Mr. and Mrs. Smith."
She wafted us through a hospitable open door into the brilliantly lit surgery. In one cor- fier, under the concentrated glare of several elec- trics, stood what I took to be the Western equi- valent of the Rosetta Stone. In the diametric- ally opposed corner stood a forbiddingly aloof chair, over which glowed a ( ?) sacred lamp.
The doctor advanced to meet us with the Collins Street smile on his lips, and, waving my wife towards the lone chair, dug himself in be- hind a huge desk.
"Now," he said genially, "why do you come in to see me ?"
"We're strangers to Melbourne," I answered,
"and yours was the first optician's plate we saw."
The smile on the doctor's face became even more Collins Streety, but he spoke suavely enough.
"But what leads you to search for an ocu- list at all ?"
"It's her eyes," I replied. "She has glasses, but she thought they needed changing, though she used to be able to see beautiful with them.
But I said to her PI
He waved me to silence with a magnificent gesture, and turned questioningly to my wife.
On receipt of her explanation, he sprang up, and, abstracting from a case a contraption not unlike a rachitic cavalry bit, fitted it across her nose, and, blocking up one eye with a little disc, called upon her to "read, please."
The Doctor advanced to meet us with the Collins Street
smile on his lips.
My wife responded by rendering some of the sprightly stanzas engraved on the Rosetta Stone. She read down as far as I could see, and then made up a whole lot more on her own account.
The doctor rewarded her by putting in each eye a drop from a gaily colored bottle, which he selected from a battalion of its fellows who gave to one of his tables the pleasing appearance of that now extinct institution, an American Bar. If you'd seen the fuss she made !
I nearly died laughing.
Then I strolled over to where she was sitting to see how disc. many of the letters I could
read.
When I told the doctor how far I could get he raised his eyebrows until he appeared to be bald, made me sit down in the chair of penance, and awarded me the Order of the Ferrous Face-piece (no class).
Blocking up one eye with a little
One eye was jake, but, with the other, all save the most arresting of the letters were invisible to me.
The doctor removed the birdcage from my nose, and with it a modicum of the epithelial covering of that organ—a fact he was much too preoccupied to notice.
"Look out of the window," he says, all of a sudden. "Now at my finger.
Now out the window. At my finger. Out the window."
"It's no go, doc," I says. "I've studied the little grey books, and you can't bamboozle—" but he switched on an electric torch a few inches from my face, and fairly took my breath away. Then he switched it off, then on, then off, then on again.
"What's it advertising, doc?" I asked. "I can't make out the lettering."
That seemed to rile him a bit, for he asked me to look up, and emptied into each eye about half a hatful of strong nitric.
Hurt? I should say ! And to hear my wife laugh you'd have thought I was making a fuss about nothing. Heartless, I call it!
He seemed to tire of us after that, and drafted us off into a half-dark room
"to wait till the drops had acted." Acted, indeed! I'd had enough action for one day, but the window wouldn't open, and the only door was the one com- municating with his surgery, so I sat down.
After about ten minutes, when I was three-parts blind, and getting worse every minute, in he comes again with his squirter loaded in barrel and magazine:
and held at "the ready." I unlaced my hoots. By the time I again reached the surface he had vanished.
After a while he led us back into his surgery, and, setting me up in the sacrificial chair, again fitted the trial frame on my face. His next move was to turn on a fair sizzler of a light just abaft my right ear. I broke out in a gentle sweat, but, thinking to "crack hardy," said :
"How do you like 'em, doc? Hard or lightly done?"
But he never smiled.
Instead he stood off a pace or so, fitted a little shiny instrument up against his eye, and projected a beam of overproof brilliance—bing !—f air into my right eye. I ducked and smothered as best 1 could, but that beam of light followed me around.
"Look at my forehead," says the doctor.
His f orehead! All I could see was a shiny green blur with his legs under it, and all the sparks of Morwell darting from its centre. However, I kept what remained of my gaze glued on where I had last seen his noble brow, and he seemed satisfied.
Suddenly he switched off the fireworks, fitted a couple of glasses before my eye, and—
"Now tell me what you read," he says.
"Not much, doctor," I answered. "The paper of a morning, and sometimes the Spec—"
"No, no," he says, quite snappish. "What can you read on that card in the corner?"
I could see nothing but the good old chapter headings from the Rosetta Stone,
E. TB. DLN."
"Ve-ery good," he says, with a smirk.
if I hadn't altered the card."
blur, but I remembered a few of the so I began—
"And they would be quite correct-
By the time I had recovered a bit the blur was lifting, so I obliged with that truly noble passage which commences, "B. DE. TBR."
Soon I came to where the letters get all blurry, and then the doctor took a hand.
He did something to the crockery before my eye.
"Is it better now ?" he says.
"L.F.O.," I answered.
"Is it any better ?" he asks.
"I can see the letters, but I can't tell what they are."
"Is it worse, then?"
"It's not any better. I can't see it."
"But is it better or worse ?"
"Oh, no. It's not any worse. It's clear for the big ones, but then they look double to me."
He altered the lenses again.
"Is that better ?" he says.
"They look like Chinese characters now," I replied. "Now they look as if they had lines through them."
He twisted the lenses a bit more.
"Oh, now they look upside down," I exclaimed.
"Read on," he says grimly, "I was born that way."
I was pretty mad by this time, so replied : "Well, you'll die right side up—
with a rope to keep you so."
But you can't ruffle these Collins Street coves—not outwardly. He just heaves a bit of a sigh.
"Mr. Smith," he says, "tell me. Can you see better like that or like this ?"
"Like what ?" I snaps.
"I altered the lenses a bit," says he, speaking very slow. "Can you see better with them as they are now ?"
"No," I says. "Just about the same."
"Well, is it better like this?" he says, monkeying with the glasses again.
"Much of a muchness," I replied.
"Bone. Pure bone," he mutters, sort of "so so voice." Then out loud,
"Please read the letters and I'll judge for myself."
"B. DE.," I began, but he interrupted.
"In the sacred name of sanity, I conjure you to omit the earlier chapters, and to read only the lowest line you can manage."
"I can't see it," I confessed. "It only looks like a row of dots to me."
"But I merely asked for the lowest line you could SEE," he fairly shouted.
"The sixth," I said.
"Oh, read it, read it," he says.
"I can't, after all," I replied. "Only a letter here and there."
"Well, try the line above it."
"PZE—PZE—er—and then I can't make out the next letter. It may be a
U or an E or—"
"Call it a 'U'," he says with a sigh.
"USC," I finished triumphantly.
He made me sit down in front of a black curtain.
"Put your chin on the cross-bar," he says.
"My chin ?"
"Yes, your chin—that gentle declivity connecting your lower lip with your pomum adami, on which a sparse vegetation maintains a precarious existence."
I did •so.
"Now," he says, brisk as a bookmaker, "cover your left eye with your fingers, watch the white dot in the centre of the curtain, and tell me when you see the other dot appear below."
I raised my head.
"What other dot?" I asked.
"This one I am holding in my hand," he shouts, waving it.
"I can see it all the time," I said, with a grin.
"Yes, but you're looking at it," he snaps. "Put your chin back on the cross-bar, watch the centre dot, and tell me when you see the other one."
"NOW," I yells suddenly, and nearly bit my tongue off. I'd forgotten about that blamed cross-bar.
"Didn't you see it before that?" he says.
"Not much before," I answers through clenched teeth.
At last he was finished (he gave the wife a terrible easy spin).
"Now I shall want to see you both again in a couple of days' time," he says with a smile. "Just look up a moment, please."
I hadn't noticed the eye-dropper in his hand, and by the time I recovered my breath we were both in the street, half blinded by the glare of the sun, in spite of a thick fog which had descended on the city since we went in to the doctor.
Oculists is Hades !
0,0
LISTER'S FIRST EXPERIMENT WITH THE DRAIN-TUBE.
(From Wrench's " Life of Lord Lister.")
"Lister opened an abscess beneath Queen Victoria's arm. The operation was successful. He put in a strip of carbolic lint to keep the wound open for drainage. But, unfortunately, the matter of the abscess did not come away properly, and the Queen was still feverish and in pain. Lister, disturbed by this unfavourable course, walked alone: in the grounds of Balmoral, a lonely walk being his custom when he had a difficult problem to solve. Dur- ing his cogitations it 'occurred to him that a piece of indiarubber tubing might form an excellent path of exit to the discharge of a wound. It is illus- trative of Lister's bold faith in himself that, though his patient was the highest in the land, he did not hesitate to make her the first subject of this experiment. He returned from his walk, cut a piece of tubing from the spray apparatus, and soaked it all night in carbolic. In the morning he made use of it, and at the next dressing, to his 'inexpressible joy,' the discharge was thin and watery."
—"BRASSARD."
//