A Cure At Porlock

For whatever did it—the cider at the Ship Inn, where the crowd from the bar that night had overflowed singing into Southey’s Corner, or an early warning of appendicitis— the remedy the chemist in the High Street purveyed was still a dose of kaopectate in morphine—the bane and the afflatus of S.T.C. when Alph, the sacred river, surfaced briefly in the unlikely vicinity of Baker Farm, and as quickly sank again, routed forever by the visitor whose business, intent and disposition— whether ill or well is just as immaterial— long ago sunk Lethewards, a particle of the unbottled ultimate solution. I drank my dose, and after an afternoon prostrate, between heaves, on the coldly purgatorial tiles of the W.C., found it elysium simply to recline, sipping flat ginger beer as though it were honeydew, in that billowy bed, under pink chenille, hearing you read The Mystery of Edwin Drood! For whether the opium was worth it for John Jasper, from finding being with you, even sick at Porlock, a rosily addictive picnic, I left less likely ever to recover.