I brought him his trunk, and he put it on a table, where people had tea in the park sometimes, to watch a game of cricket from a sheltered place. "Come quite close," he said very kindly, throwing open the trunk, and then making for the door, while I rashly stooped over his property. In another minute I was lying down, actually sneezed off my legs, and unable to open my eyes from some spasmodic affection or affliction.
"That's right," said Harold, in a tone of satisfaction; "don't be uneasy, my dear brother. For at least a fortnight you are immune from the biggest enterprises of the most active Local Board. You may sit upon the manholes of the best sanitated town; you may sleep in the House of Commons; you may pay a medical fee, and survive it. It is my own discovery. See those boxes?"
"Not yet. But I shall as soon as my eyes get right!" I was able now to leave off sneezing, almost for a second. And when I had chewed a bit of leaf he gave me, there seemed to be something great in this new idea.
"You are concluding with your usual slur"--my brother began again, as soon as I was fit to receive reason instead of sympathy--"that this is nothing more than an adaptation of _Lundy Foote_, _Irish blackguard_, or _Welsh Harp_. George, you are wrong, as usual. You need not be capable of speech for that. Your gifts of error can express themselves in silence."
"Cowardly reasoner," I began, but the movement of larynx, or whatever it might be, threw me out of "ratiocination." He had me at his mercy, and he kept me so. To attempt to repeat what he said would convict me of crankiness equal to his own, and worse--because he could do it, and I cannot. But the point he insisted on most of all, and which after my experience I could not but concede, was that no known preparation of snuff without his special chemistry could have achieved this excellence.
"Pteroxylon, euphorbium, and another irritant unknown as yet to Chemists, have brought this to the power needful. But this is not a merely speculative thing. You feel a true interest in it now, George."
"As men praise mustard, with tears in their eyes. But let me never hear of it, think of it, most of all never smell the like again. My nose will be red, and my eyes sore for a fortnight."