Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Over the teacups / by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.
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![bier is a knock-down blow to temperance, but the little thimbleful of brandy, or Chartreuse, or Maraschino, is only, as it were, tweaking the nose of teetotalism.] Well, — to go back behind our brackets, — the guest is calling to the waiter, Garconf et le bain de pieds ! Waiter! and the foot-bath ! — The little glass stands in a small tin saucer or shallow dish, and the custom is to more than fill the glass, so that some extra brandy run3 over into this tin saucer or cup- plate, to the manifest gain of the consumer. Life is a petit verre of a very peculiar kind of spirit. At severity years it used to be said that th^, little glass was full. We should be more apt to put it at eighty in our day, while Gladstone and. Tennyson and our own Whittier are breathing, moving, think- ing, writing, speaking, in the green preserve belong- ing to their children and grandchildren, and Bancroft is keeping watch of the gamekeeper in the distance. But, returning resolutely to the petit verve, I am will- ing to concede that all after fourscore is the bain de pieds, — the slopping over, so to speak, of the full measure of life. I remember that one who was very near and dear to me, and who lived to a great age, so that the ten-barred gate of the century did not look very far off, would sometimes apologize in a very sweet, natural way for lingering so long to be a care and perhaps a burden to her children, themselves get- ting well into years. It is not hard to understand the feeling, never less called for than it was in the case of that beloved nonagenarian. I have known few per- sons, }Toung or old, more sincerely and justly regretted than the gentle lady whose memory comes up before me as I write. Oh, if we could all go out of flower as gracef ullvr](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21019708_0302.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
