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One was that of a child who had been fished up from the Seine that morning; the second that of a stonemason who had fallen from a scaffolding and broken his neck and both legs; the third was the murdered man of the Hôtel Paradis, the Baron d'Enot, stripped of his well-made clothes, lying stark and stiff on his back, with the great knife-wound gaping red and festering in his breast.
He reads a chapter in the guidebooks, mixes the facts all up, with his bad memory, and then goes off to inflict the whole mess on somebody as wisdom which has been festering in his brain for years and which he gathered in college from erudite authors who are dead now and out of print.
As when in a hostile country one has laid aside his armour, and from unregarded ambush the enemy leaps on him, and, though he be strong and noble, stabs him with a festering wound, so this temptation to a base act sprang on poor Kennedy when he was unarmed and unprepared.
An unlucky movement while asleep broke the crust on which I reposed, and the hot steam, pouring upon my hip, scalded it severely before I could escape. This new affliction, added to my frost-bitten feet, already festering, was the cause of frequent delays and unceasing pain through all my wanderings.
And so the thing became a game of endurance with us, a slow wearing away of ammunition and food, a growing fever from weakness and loss of blood, a festering of wounds, the ebbing out of strength and hope; while putrid mule meat and muddy water, the sickening stench from naked bloated bodies under the blazing heat of day, the long, long hours of watching for deliverance that came not, and the certainty of the fate awaiting us at last if rescue failed us these things marked the hours and made them all alike.
The one great sorrow of his life, the thorn in the flesh which was always festering, the wound which would not be cured, the grief for which there was no remedy, was his love for Clarissa Underwood. He had asked her thrice to be his wife, with very little interval, indeed, between the separate prayers, and had been so answered that he entertained no hope.
Upon each visit the husband and wife had been informed by the physician that he did not believe the trouble was organic in its nature, that he believed it depended upon some ideas that the patient had, and that, furthermore, it was the result of some mental irritation, compared for the purpose of fixing the point to a festering sore and which, if removed, would permanently eliminate the liability of such seizures.
Several fruit-brokers had their marts near Todgers's; and one of the first impressions wrought upon the stranger's senses was of oranges of damaged oranges with blue and green bruises on them, festering in boxes, or mouldering away in cellars.
The result of this is that the constant inflow of sewage from the great city pouring into the harbor is never diluted, and through the summer is simply a festering mass of corruption, fronting the whole sea wall and throwing a stench into the air which must be breathed by everyone on shipboard.
Then the dread that the community had of hospitals, as places that "help the poor to die," in Browning's phrase, had a certain amount of foundation; and cases operated upon in a farmhouse kitchen, where no one in the family happened to have had a boil or a catarrh or a festering cut within a month or so, and where the knife happened to be clean or new, would recover with less suppuration than hospital cases.
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