Jude the Obsure

"Well, my man! I'm in a hurry, so you'll have to walk pretty fast

if you keep alongside of me. Do you know who I am?"

"Yes, I think. Physician Vilbert?"

"Ah--I'm known everywhere, I see! That comes of being a public

benefactor."

Vilbert was an itinerant quack-doctor, well known to the rustic

population, and absolutely unknown to anybody else, as he, indeed,

took care to be, to avoid inconvenient investigations. Cottagers

formed his only patients, and his Wessex-wide repute was among them

alone. His position was humbler and his field more obscure than

those of the quacks with capital and an organized system of

advertising. He was, in fact, a survival. The distances he

traversed on foot were enormous, and extended nearly the whole length

and breadth of Wessex. Jude had one day seen him selling a pot of

coloured lard to an old woman as a certain cure for a bad leg, the

woman arranging to pay a guinea, in instalments of a shilling a

fortnight, for the precious salve, which, according to the physician,

could only be obtained from a particular animal which grazed on

Mount Sinai, and was to be captured only at great risk to life and

limb. Jude, though he already had his doubts about this gentleman's

medicines, felt him to be unquestionably a travelled personage, and

one who might be a trustworthy source of information on matters not

strictly professional.

"I s'pose you've been to Christminster, Physician?"

"I have--many times," replied the long thin man. "That's one of my

centres."

"It's a wonderful city for scholarship and religion?"

"You'd say so, my boy, if you'd seen it. Why, the very sons of the

old women who do the washing of the colleges can talk in Latin--not

good Latin, that I admit, as a critic: dog-Latin--cat-Latin, as we

used to call it in my undergraduate days."

"And Greek?"

"Well--that's more for the men who are in training for bishops, that

they may be able to read the New Testament in the original."

"I want to learn Latin and Greek myself."

"A lofty desire. You must get a grammar of each tongue."

"I mean to go to Christminster some day."

"Whenever you do, you say that Physician Vilbert is the only

proprietor of those celebrated pills that infallibly cure all

disorders of the alimentary system, as well as asthma and shortness

of breath. Two and threepence a box--specially licensed by the

government stamp."

"Can you get me the grammars if I promise to say it hereabout?"