For women who are hysterical, and go heart and soul into the business of being sick, I have found the little pills a most charming resort, because you cannot carry the refinement of symptoms beyond what my friend Jahr has done in the way of fitting medicines to them, so that, if I had been disposed honestly to practise this droll style of therapeutics, it had, as I saw, certain conveniences.
Another year went by, and I was beginning to prosper in my new mode of life. The medicines (being chiefly milk-sugar, with variations as to the labels) cost next to nothing; and, as I charged pretty well for both these and my advice, I was now able to start a gig, and also to bring my sister, a very pretty girl of fourteen years old, to live with me in a small house which I rented, a square from my old office.
This business of my sister's is one of the things I like the least to look back upon. When she came to me she was a pale-faced child, with large, mournful gray eyes, soft, yellow hair, and the promise of remarkable good looks. As to her attachment to me, it was something quite ridiculous. She followed me to the door when I went out, waited for me to come in, lay awake until she heard my step at night, and, in a word, hung around my neck like a kind of affectionate mill-stone.
"I Am indebted to you for a knowledge of life in the old cathedral towns of England,--of the ecclesiastical side of society, so minute and authentic that it is like a personal experience." Thus I replied to Anthony Trollope's declaration that he lacked an essential quality of the novelist,--imagination. "Ah," he replied, "when you speak of careful observation and the honest and thorough report thereof, I am conscious of fidelity to the facts of life and character; but," he added, with that bluff heartiness so characteristic of the man, "my brother is more than an accurate observer: he is a scholar, a philosopher as well, with historical tastes and cosmopolitan sympathies,--a patient student. You should read his books";--and he snatched a pencil, and wrote out the list for me.[13] Only two of Thomas Adolphus Trollope's volumes have been republished in this country,--one a novel of English life, in tenor and traits very like his brother's, the other a brief memoir of a famous and fair Italian.[14] This curious neglect on the part of American publishers induces us to briefly record this industrious and interesting author's claims to grateful recognition, especially on the part of those who cherish fond recollections of Italian travel, and enjoy the sympathetic and intelligent illustration of Italian life and history.