Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/233

 brethren, he was essentially a man of the world, fond of studying all sorts and conditions of men, and with all his enormous practice finding time for society, theatres, music, and literature of all kinds. He was engaged out to dinner that day—to a very pleasant little dinner, where he was to have met a private secretary of a cabinet minister, a newspaper editor, a portrait painter, a Duke, and a clerk in an insurance office, who gave wonderful imitations. The hostess was a French actress, and the cooking would have been perfect. So Mr. Godby shook his head very mournfully over the Helmingham telegram, and had he not held his old friend Osborne in great respect, and wished to do him a service, he would have refused to obey its mandate. As it was, he resigned himself to his fate, and arrived, chilled to the bone, but bright-eyed and ready-witted, at Woolgreaves at two in the morning. He shook his head when he saw the patient, and expressed to Doctor Osborne his doubt of the efficacy of trepanning, but he proposed to operate at once.

"It's all over, mother," said Marian to Mrs. Ashurst, the next morning. "Mr. Godby was right; poor Tom never rallied, and sank at seven this morning."

"God help his poor father!" said the old lady, through her tears; "he has nothing left him now."

"Nothing!" said Marian—then added, half unconsciously—"except his money! except his money!"

is as good as a nightmare to look at the pictures in Schenck's History of Monsters, a little quarto book of memorable human deformities, published two hundred and sixty years ago. The author was one of the best physicians of the time, a voluminous writer who has left up a thick closely printed folio of the most interesting cases he had met with in medicine and surgery, monsters included; but the monsters have also a little volume to themselves. We start with a child all body and no head, but having windows in its breast, for there were its eyes. Then comes the son of a tailor of Mecklenburg, who had what seemed to be the faint suggestion of a face wrapped round with a great Turkish nightcap. As there seemed to be a face under a plastic mask, the mask was removed, and below was revealed a horribly great month which began to roar without a tongue, and eyes without pupils, behind which fire seemed to shine; there was no brain, and there were no bones to the skull, but the upper part of the head was twisted up like a tall turban. The right hand of this child was always open, the left always doubled into a fist. Doctor Schenck gives an edifying picture, after the manner of a modern Valentine, showing the child's head as it appeared before the mask was lifted. You may lift the mask here for yourself, and see what you shall see—not a cupid. It is hardly worth while to mention children with cat's heads; or with horns, and a broad mouth like a whale's, or a young shark's before its teething; or with pigtails actually growing from their necks. That latter form must, in the days of periwig, have been looked upon as a laudable effort on the part of nature, to keep pace with the fashions. One child had a goose's back and wings, another a frog's head, another large erect hare's ears. A little fellow at Stettin was born with something like a tortoiseshell on the top of his head, and a white mouse's tail peeping out from under it. There was (was there?) a child born at Basle, in fifteen hundred and fifty-six, with such wide nostrils, that his brain could be seen through them. But then another had no nose at all, nor eyes, nor ears, only a mouth, and the rest of the face blank; while another had so much room in his head that a full-sized arm grew out from where one of his ears should be. This monster had also no elbows or knees.

From the commentaries of Sigibert we are told of the child born at Emmaus in the reign of Emperor Theodosius, single below the chest, or chests, but with two chests, arms, and heads. The two heads were not better than one, for they were differently affected; one might be crying while the other laughed, one feeding, the other sleeping; sometimes they quarrelled, and there was a fight of the two pairs of arms. This child is said to have lived two years, one part dying four days before the other, which was killed by the decay of its inseparable neighbour. Cardan tells us of a Milanese girl with two heads, in all other respects single, except that she was found after death to have two stomachs. It would not have been bigamy to marry her, although in fairness she would be entitled to a husband with two heads; not the creature figured by the side of her with two monkey heads, monkey legs, and a fox's brush, but possibly the sage two-headed philosopher figured below her, one of whose heads looks very much startled at what his other head is whispering into its ear. There are gentlemen living who would find it a great convenience, and whose friends would find it a great convenience, if they could indulge in this manner their taste for conversation, and yet keep their conversation to themselves. Among the two-headed women was one in Bavaria, aged twenty-six, of whose two faces one was pretty the other ugly. In the time of Francis the First of France, there was a man with two heads, whose second head grew out of the trunk of his body, and was carried under his waistcoat. This head had a secret hunger of its own, that