DOCTOR MARIGOLD'S PRESCRIPTIONS.

THE EXTRA CHRISTMAS NUMBER OF ALL THE YEAR ROUND.
CONDUCTED BY CHARLES DICKENS.
CONTAINING THE AMOUNT OF TWO ORDINARY NUMBERS.

CHRISTMAS, 1865. Price 4d.

INDEX

                         I.
   TO BE TAKEN IMMEDIATELY.

I AM a Cheap Jack, and my own father's
name was Willum Marigold. It was in his
lifetime supposed by some that his name was
William, but my own father always consistently
said, No, it was Willum. On which point I
content myself with looking at the argument this
way:—If a man is not allowed to know his own
name in a free country, how much is he allowed
to know in a land of slavery? As to looking at
the argument through the medium of the Register,
Willum Marigold come into the world
before Registers come up much—and went out
of it too. They wouldn't have been greatly in
his line neither, if they had chanced to come up
before him.

I was born on the Queen's highway, but it
was the King's at that time. A doctor was
fetched to my own mother by my own father,
when it took place on a common; and in consequence
of his being a very kind gentleman, and
accepting no fee but a tea-tray, I was named
Doctor, out of gratitude and compliment to
him. There you have me. Doctor Marigold.

I am at present a middle-aged man of a
broadish build, in cords, leggings, and a sleeved
waistcoat the strings of which is always gone
behind. Repair them how you will, they go like
fiddle-strings. You have been to the theatre, and
you have seen one of the wiolin-players screw up
his wiolin, after listening to it as if it had been
whispering the secret to him that it feared it was
out of order, and then you have heard it snap.
That's as exactly similar to my waistcoat, as a
waistcoat and a wiolin can be like one another.

I am partial to a white hat, and I like a shawl
round my neck wore loose and easy. Sitting
down is my favourite posture. If I have a taste
in point of personal jewellery, it is mother-of-pearl
buttons. There you have me again, as
large as life.

The doctor having accepted a tea-tray, you'll
guess that my father was a Cheap Jack before
me. You are right. He was. It was a pretty
tray. It represented a large lady going along a
serpentining up-hill gravel-walk, to attend a little
church. Two swans had likewise come astray
with the same intentions. When I call her a
large lady, I don't mean in point of breadth, for
there she fell below my views, but she more than
made it up in heighth; her heighth and slimness
was—in short THE heighth of both.

I often saw that tray, after I was the
innocently smiling cause (or more likely screeching
one) of the doctor's standing it up on a table
against the wall in his consulting-room. Whenever
my own father and mother were in that
part of the country, I used to put my head (I
have heard my own mother say it was flaxen
curls at that time, though you wouldn't know
an old hearth-broom from it now, till you come
to the handle and found it wasn't me) in at the
doctor's door, and the doctor was always glad
to see me, and said, "Aha, my brother
practitioner! Come in, little M.D. How are your
inclinations as to sixpence?"

You can't go on for ever, you'll find, nor yet
could my father nor yet my mother. If you
don't go off as a whole when you are about
due, you're liable to go off in part and two
to one your head's the part. Gradually my
father went off his, and my mother went off
hers. It was in a harmless way, but it put out
the family where I boarded them. The old
couple, though retired, got to be wholly and
solely devoted to the Cheap Jack business, and
were always selling the family off. Whenever
the cloth was laid for dinner, my father began
rattling the plates and dishes, as we do in our
line when we put up crockery for a bid, only he
had lost the trick of it, and mostly let 'em drop
and broke 'em. As the old lady had been used to
sit in the cart, and hand the articles out one by
one to the old gentleman on the footboard to