was nothing but dreariness left. He put his hoop away, and his bat;
there was no joy in them any more. His aunt was concerned. She began to
try all manner of remedies on him. She was one of those people who
are infatuated with patent medicines and all new-fangled methods of
producing health or mending it. She was an inveterate experimenter in
these things. When something fresh in this line came out she was in a
fever, right away, to try it; not on herself, for she was never ailing,
but on anybody else that came handy. She was a subscriber for all the
Health periodicals and phrenological frauds; and the solemn ignorance
they were inflated with was breath to her nostrils. All the rot they
contained about ventilation, and how to go to bed, and how to get up,
and what to eat, and what to drink, and how much exercise to take, and
what frame of mind to keep one s self in, and what sort of clothing
to wear, was all gospel to her, and she never observed that her
health-journals of the current month customarily upset everything they
had recommended the month before. She was as simple-hearted and honest
as the day was long, and so she was an easy victim. She gathered
together her quack periodicals and her quack medicines, and thus armed
with death, went about on her pale horse, metaphorically speaking, with
hell following after. But she never suspected that she was not an
angel of healing and the balm of Gilead in disguise, to the suffering
neighbors.
The water treatment was new, now, and Tom s low condition was a windfall
to her. She had him out at daylight every morning, stood him up in the
wood-shed and drowned him with a deluge of cold water; then she scrubbed
him down with a towel like a file, and so brought him to; then she
rolled him up in a wet sheet and put him away under blankets till she
sweated his soul clean and the yellow stains of it came through his
pores as Tom said.
Yet notwithstanding all this, the boy grew more and more melancholy and
pale and dejected. She added hot baths, sitz baths, shower baths, and
plunges. The boy remained as dismal as a hearse. She began to assist the
water with a slim oatmeal diet and blister-plasters. She calculated his
capacity as she would a jug s, and filled him up every day with quack
cure-alls.
Tom had become indifferent to persecution by this time. This phase
filled the old lady s heart with consternation. This indifference must
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