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"Well, I'll expound it: phthisic, you see, manes whisht, boys: will yez hould yer tongues there phthisic, Larry, signifies that is, phthisic mind, it's not physic I'm expounding, but phthisic boys, will yez stop yer noise there signifies but, Larry, it's so deep a word in larnin' that I should draw it out on a slate for you.

"Sallie, didn't you ask me to take that Pup from Aunt Dilsie, 'cause of the phthisic, and keep her quiet while the Kit got a nap, and didn't I ask you if it would be all right if I got her back whole and clean?" "Yes, Henrietta, but you " "Ain't she whole all over and clean?" "Yes, but " "Couldn't nobody do any better than that with one of them twins. I won't try.

I suppose, poor half-starved phthisic lad, that he was the most miserable of us all. He was, I think, unfitted for the task which had been forced upon him; he was fretful, unsympathetic, agitated. The school-house, an old rambling place, possessed a long cellar-like room that opened from our general corridor and was lighted by deep windows, carefully barred, which looked into an inner garden.

The very names by which they call diseases sweeten and mollify the sharpness of them: the phthisic is with them no more than a cough, dysentery but a looseness, the pleurisy but a stitch; and, as they gently name them, so they patiently endure them; they are very great and grievous indeed when they hinder their ordinary labour; they never keep their beds but to die: "Simplex illa et aperta virtus in obscuram et solertem scientiam versa est."

As the school-master stood directly in front of me and said "Next," I could see by the twinkle in his eye that he thought I could correctly spell the word. My countenance had betrayed me. With a clear and distinct voice loud enough to be heard by every one in the room I spelled out "ph-th-is-ic phthisic." "Correct," said the school-master, and all the scholars looked aghast at my promptness.

I was once loudly censured for refusing an old gentleman who offered an enormous jointure, and died of the phthisic a year after; and was so baited with incessant importunities, that I should have given my hand to Drone the stock-jobber, had not the reduction of interest made him afraid of the expenses of matrimony.

'Stid er saying, 'my precious mother, I love you and want to be good because you want me to, about every hour, I had better wipe the twins' noses, and wash the dirt often them, and light Aunt Dilsie's phthisic pipe, and get things upstairs for Sallie and Miss Jasmine and everybody when they are downstairs. I'm too busy, I am, to be so religious. And I'm too hungry to talk any more about it."

Then, when their stomachs were full of good food, and the soul of the grape tingled in their veins, and their souls glowed under her great magnetic power, she suddenly seized the fiddle, and showed them another of her enchantments. She put it on her knee, and played a tune that would have made gout, cholic and phthisic dance upon their last legs.

"Now, boys, here's a deep word, that'll thry yez: come Larry spell me-mo-man-dran-san-ti-fi-can-du-ban-dan-li-al-i-ty, or mis-an-thro-po-mor-phi-ta-ni-a-nus-mi-ca-li-a-lioy; that's too hard for you, is it? Well, then, spell phthisic. Oh, that's physic you're spellin'. Now, Larry, do you know the difference between physic and phthisic?" "No, sir."

The household at large at Widegables can never agree on the clothing of the twins and Henrietta often has to finish their toilets thus, by force. Aunt Dilsie being reduced by her phthisic to a position that is almost entirely ornamental, Henrietta's strength of character is the only thing that has made the existence of the twins bearable to themselves or other people.