Strona:Jerome K. Jerome - Trzej ludzie w jednej łodzi.djvu/18

must have been there all the time, and must have been beating, but I cannot account for it.
 I patted myself all over my front, from what I call my waist up to my head, and I went a bit round each side, and a little way up the back. But I could not feel or hear anything.
 I tried to look at my tongue. I stuck it out as far as ever it would go, and I shut one eye, and tried to examine it with the other. I could only see the tip, and the only thing that I could gain from that was to feel more certain than before that I had scarlet fever.
 I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy, man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.
 I went to my medical man. He is an old chum of mine, and feels my pulse and looks at my tongue, and talks about the weather, all for nothing, when I fancy I‘m ill; so I thought I would do him a good turn by going to him now.
 „What a doctor wants“, I said, „is practice. He shall have me. He will get more practice out of me than out of seventeen hundred of your ordinary, commonplace patients, with only one or two diseases each“. So I went straight up and saw him, and he said:
 „Well, what‘s the matter with you?“
 I said:
 „I will not take up your time, dear boy, with telling you what is the matter with me. Life is brief, and you might pass away before I had finished. But I will tell you what is not the matter with me. I have not got housemaid‘s