Page:Punch Vol 148.djvu/324

I don't know if you are having the measles at your house. We are. They're on me. They are not half bad, really. You have to sicken for them first and then you get them. The doctor came to see me have them. He gave me a cynical thermometer to suck. He tied a piece of string to it first because he said that it was a one-minute one. I don't like the taste of thermometers. I bit one once and the end came off and disagreed with me. Jimmy says when they put the thermometer in your mouth you have to see how far you can make the mercury move up the tube. Jimmy can make it move up to the top every time. He says you have to hold your breath and then blow. The thermometer wouldn't boil, so the doctor told me to put out my tongue at him. The last time I put out my tongue at someone I had to have it impressed on my mind not to; it was over a chair.

So I asked the doctor if it wouldn't do if I made a face at him instead. I am not so very good at making faces. Not as good as old Jimmy. He can move his ears. And his scalp. Jimmy says very few people can move their ears really well. He can do it one at a time, but he won't do it now unless you give him two pen-nibs. He is collecting pen-nibs. He says if you collect a thousand pen-nibs you get a bed in a hospital.

They made me put out my tongue at the doctor. When it was all out the doctor said it was a very nice one. Then he took hold of my wrist and looked at his watch. I asked Jimmy what the doctor looked at his watch for. He told me that measles made the watch go slower, and if it stopped you were dead. Jimmy said that his wrist always made the doctor's watch stop. I asked him why he wasn't dead then, and he told me it was because he could move his ears. Jimmy says he always kept moving his ears while the doctor was busy with him.

I had the measles all right. I had only a few at first, five, I think, and the doctor said I ought to keep them tucked up or else I should catch the complications. I asked Jimmy what the complications were. He had come quietly up our backstairs to see me and the measles. I told him he would catch them too. But he said he wouldn't if he kept moving his ears. Jimmy said he knew all about the complications. He said he had done them in arithmetic; they came next to decimals and were things where the numerator was bigger than the thermometer.

When the doctor saw me next day he said the rash was well out. I know that, because I had given up counting them. The doctor said I should have to have the quarantine next.

1 asked Jimmy if he had ever had the quarantine. He said it was stuff you put on your hair to make it shine.

Jimmy brought me a caterpillar and two thrush's eggs in a matchbox. I asked him why the rash came out all over me. He said it was the measles and that they had to come up to the surface to breathe. He said if I would let him vaccinate me with his pen-knife they would all go away. Jimmy is going to be a doctor―when he grows up. He said it wouldn't hurt me if I held my breath. But I wouldn't let him. I said he might taste some of my medicine though, and he said he knew what it was made of. He said he could make me up some much better medicine than that. It was medicine that the Indians always used. They made it out of the bark of trees, and it would cure warts as well as measles. He said there was a certain way of making it that wasn't found in books, because it was only when an Indian was going to die that he told anyone how to make it. Jimmy said it was splendid stuff, and that, besides curing warts and measles, it would make boots waterproof. Only the cleverest doctors know about it, Jimmy said, and they daren't tell anyone lest the Indians should get to know, and kill them.

The doctor said I might get up and have the quarantine downstairs. He said I wasn't to go near anyone or they would catch it. He said I looked very happy. I was. You see the doctor had sat down on the chair on which I had placed the thrush's eggs. Jimmy says it is unlucky to sit on thrush's eggs, but that you can make it all right again by counting ten backwards. That was what the Indians did, he said.

I didn't mind the quarantine a bit, though it made me feel weak in my legs at first. Jimmy said that the best thing for weak legs was to walk barefoot through nettles. He said that the Indians made their children do that, and that was why they could run so well. Jimmy made me some medicine out of a rare kind of root he had found by accident. It smelt like cabbage. He said it would make me feel very hungry and that he always took some at Christmas time. A gipsy had told him the secret in confidence in exchange for a pair of his father's boots which he thought his father had done with.

When I was nearly well from the quarantine Jimmy and I arranged to go fishing. He said he had some stuff which attracted all the fish if you poured some in the river. He said that a poacher told him how to make it.

Jimmy says next to being a doctor he would like to be a poacher. He told me how to catch pheasants. All you had to do was to put some stuff out of a bottle on the ground, near where the pheasants roosted at night, and it would stupefy them. Then, he said, they fell out of the trees and you put them in a bag. He said the stuff was made out of herbs which came from Australia. It was very strong stuff, he said. Two drops placed on the tongue of a dog would kill the strongest elephant, Jimmy said.

We didn't go fishing after all. I waited for Jimmy for over an hour, but he didn't turn up. So I went to his mother's house. Jiminy lives with his mother. Jimmy's mother said that he was in bed very busy with the measles and that he wanted to be left alone.

Village Haberdasher. "Yew take it from me, Sir, folk in our village be very spiteful agin the Germans. Why, Oi reckon Oi've sold fifty 'anker-chers wi' Kitchener's face on 'em!"