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558 THE ADVENTURES OF PHILIP
an immense revenue to the fortunate inventors. For the ladies
whom Mrs. Brandon attended, the remedy was of priceless value.
He would send her some. His friend, Captain Morgan, of the
Southampton packet-ship, would bring her some of this astonishing
medicine. Let her try it. Let her show the accompanying cases
to Dr. Goodenough—to any of his brother physicians in London.
Though himself an exile from his country, he loved it, and was
proud in being able to confer upon it one of the greatest blessings
with which science had endowed mankind.
Goodenough, I am sorry to say, had such a mistrust of his
confrere that he chose to disbelieve any statement Firmin made.
" I don't believe, my good Brandon, the fellow has nous enough to
light upon any scientific discovery more useful than a new sauce for
cutlets. He invent anything but fibs, never!" You see this
Goodenough is an obstinate old heathen; and when he has once
found reason to mistrust a man, he for ever after declines to
believe him.
However, the Doctor is a man for ever on the look-out for more
knowledge of his profession, and for more remedies to benefit mankind
: he hummed and ha'd over the pamphlet, as the Little Sister
sat watching him in his study. He clapped it down after a while,
and slapped his hands on his little legs as his wont is. " Brandon,"
he says, " I think there is a great deal in it, and I think so the
more because it turns out that Firmin has nothing to do with the
discovery, which has been made at Boston." In fact, Dr. Firmin,
late of London, had only been present in the Boston hospital, where
the experiments were made with the new remedy. He had cried
" halves," and proposed to sell it as a secret remedy, and the bottle
which he forwarded to our friend the Little Sister was labelled
" Firmin's Anodyne." What Firmin did, indeed, was what he had
been in the habit of doing. He had taken another man's property,
and was endeavouring to make a flourish with it. The Little Sister
returned home, then, with her bottle of Chloroform—for this was
what Dr. Firmin chose to call his discovery, and he had sent home
a specimen of it ; as he sent home a cask of petroleum from Virginia ;
as he sent proposals for new railways upon which he promised Philip
a munificent commission, if his son could but place the shares
amongst his friends.
And with regard to these valuables, the sanguine Doctor got
to believe that he really was endowing his son with large sums of
money. " My boy has set up a house, and has a wife and two
children, the young jackanapes !" he would say to people in New
York ; " as if he had not been extravagant enough in former days !
When I married, I had private means, and married a nobleman's