Peculiarities of Life

There was a boy at our school; we used to call him Sandford and Merton. His real name was Stivvings. He was the most extraordinary lad I ever came across. I believe he really liked study. He used to get into awful rows for sitting up in bed and reading Greek; and as for French irregular verbs, there was simply no keeping him. He was full of weird and unnatural notions about being a credit to his parents and an honor to the school; and he yearned to win prizes, and grow up to be a clever man, and had all those weak- minded ideas. I never knew such a creature, yet harmless, mind you, as the babe unborn.

Well, that boy used to get ill about twice a week, so that he couldn’t go to school. There never was such a boy as Sandford and Merton. If there was any known disease going ten miles of him, he had it badly. He would have bronchitis in the dog- days and hay- fever at Christmas. After a six- week period of drought, he would be stricken down with rheumatic fever; and he would go out in a November fog and come back with sunstroke.

They put him under laughing gas one year, poor lad and drew all his teeth, and gave him a false set, because he suffered so terribly from toothache; and then it turned to neuralgia and ear- ache. He was never without a cold, except for once in nine weeks while he had scarlet fever: and he always had chilblains. During the great cholera scare in 1871, our neighborhood was singularly free from it. There was only one reputed case in the whole parish: that case was young Stivvings. He had to stay in bed when he was ill, and eat chicken and custards and hot- house grapes; and he would lie there and sob, because they wouldn’t let him do Latin exercises, and took his German grammar away from him.

And we other boys, who would have sacrificed ten terms of our school life for the sake of being ill for a day, would stay out on blustery days, and it did us good and freshened us up: and we took things to make us sick, and they made us fat, and gave us an appetite. Nothing we could think of seemed to make us sick until the holidays began. Then on the breaking up days we caught colds and whooping coughs and all kinds of disorders which lasted till we recommenced: when inspite we could maneuver to the contrary we would get suddenly well again, and be better than ever.

Such is life.

- An excerpt from Three Men in a Boat.