Doctor Marigold | Page 3

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This etext was prepared from the 1894 Chapman and Hall "Christmas
Stories" edition by David Price, email [email protected]

DOCTOR MARIGOLD

I am a Cheap Jack, and my own father's name was Willum Marigold. It

was in his lifetime supposed by some that his name was William, but
my own father always consistently said, No, it was Willum. On which
point I content myself with looking at the argument this way: If a man
is not allowed to know his own name in a free country, how much is he
allowed to know in a land of slavery? As to looking at the argument
through the medium of the Register, Willum Marigold come into the
world before Registers come up much,--and went out of it too. They
wouldn't have been greatly in his line neither, if they had chanced to
come up before him.
I was born on the Queen's highway, but it was the King's at that time. A
doctor was fetched to my own mother by my own father, when it took
place on a common; and in consequence of his being a very kind
gentleman, and accepting no fee but a tea-tray, I was named Doctor, out
of gratitude and compliment to him. There you have me. Doctor
Marigold.
I am at present a middle-aged man of a broadish build, in cords,
leggings, and a sleeved waistcoat the strings of which is always gone
behind. Repair them how you will, they go like fiddle-strings. You
have been to the theatre, and you have seen one of the wiolin- players
screw up his wiolin, after listening to it as if it had been whispering the
secret to him that it feared it was out of order, and then you have heard
it snap. That's as exactly similar to my waistcoat as a waistcoat and a
wiolin can be like one another.
I am partial to a white hat, and I like a shawl round my neck wore loose
and easy. Sitting down is my favourite posture. If I have a taste in point
of personal jewelry, it is mother-of-pearl buttons. There you have me
again, as large as life.
The doctor having accepted a tea-tray, you'll guess that my father was a
Cheap Jack before me. You are right. He was. It was a pretty tray. It
represented a large lady going along a serpentining up-hill gravel-walk,
to attend a little church. Two swans had likewise come astray with the
same intentions. When I call her a large lady, I don't mean in point of
breadth, for there she fell below my views, but she more than made it
up in heighth; her heighth and slimness was--in short THE heighth of
both.
I often saw that tray, after I was the innocently smiling cause (or more
likely screeching one) of the doctor's standing it up on a table against

the wall in his consulting-room. Whenever my own father and mother
were in that part of the country, I used to put my head (I have heard my
own mother say it was flaxen curls at that time, though you wouldn't
know an old hearth-broom from it now till you come to the handle, and
found it wasn't me) in at the doctor's door, and the doctor was always
glad to see me, and said, "Aha, my brother practitioner! Come in, little
M.D. How are your inclinations as to sixpence?"
You can't go on for ever, you'll find, nor yet could my father nor yet my
mother. If you don't go off as a whole when you are about due, you're
liable