As I said before, Miss Isabel Revel made her appearance not unattended, for she was escorted by Doctor Plausible, the surgeon of the ship.  And now I must again digress while I introduce that gentleman.  I never shall get that poor girl from the cuddy-door.

Doctor Plausible had been summoned to prescribe for Miss Laura Revel, who suffered extremely from the motion of the vessel, and the remedies which she had applied to relieve her uneasiness.  Miss Laura Revel had been told by somebody, previous to her embarkation, that the most effectual remedy for sea-sickness was gingerbread.  In pursuance of the advice received, she had provided herself with ten or twelve squares of this commodity, about one foot by eighteen inches, which squares she had commenced upon as soon as she came on board, and had never ceased to swallow, notwithstanding various interruptions.  The more did her stomach reject it the more did she force it down, until, what with deglutition, et vice versa, she had been reduced to a state of extreme weakness, attended with fever.

How many panaceas have been offered without success for two evils—­sea-sickness and hydrophobia! and between these two there appears to be a link, for sea-sickness as surely ends in hydrophobia, as hydrophobia does in death.  The sovereign remedy prescribed, when I first went to sea, was a piece of fat pork, tied to a string, to be swallowed, and then pulled up again; the dose to be repeated until effective.  I should not have mentioned this well-known remedy, as it has long been superseded by other nostrums, were it not that this maritime prescription has been the origin of two modern improvements in the medical catalogue—­one is the stomach-pump, evidently borrowed from this simple engine; the other is the very successful prescription now in vogue, to those who are weak in the digestive organs, to eat fat bacon for breakfast, which I have no doubt was suggested to Doctor Vance, from what he had been eye-witness to on board of a man-of-war.

But here I am digressing again from Doctor Plausible to Doctor Vance.  Reader, I never lose the opportunity of drawing a moral; and what an important one is here!  Observe how difficult it is to regain the right path when once you have quitted it.  Let my error be a warning to you in your journey through life, and my digressions preserve you from diverging from the beaten track, which, as the Americans would say, leads clean slick on to happiness and peace.

Doctor Plausible was a personable man, apparently about five-and-thirty years old; he wore a little powder in his hair, black silk stockings, and knee-breeches.  In this I consider Doctor Plausible was right; the above look much more scientific than Wellington trousers; and much depends upon the exterior.  He was quite a ladies’ man; talked to them about their extreme sensibility, their peculiar fineness of organic structure, their delicacy of nerves; and soothed his patients