Friday, December the 19th, 2003
back to: title, date or indexes
“In my own case I have imputed my early baldness to growth in intellectuality and spirituality induced by my fondness for and devotion to books. Miss Susan, my sister, lays it to other causes, first among which she declares to be my unnatural practice of reading in bed, and the second my habit of eating welsh-rarebits late of nights. Over my bed I have a gas-jet so properly shaded that the rays of light are concentrated and reflected downward upon the volume which I am reading. Miss Susan insists that much of this light and its attendant heat falls upon my head, compelling there a dryness of the scalp whereby the follicles have been deprived of their natural nourishment and have consequently died. She furthermore maintains that the welsh-rarebits of which I partake invariably at the eleventh hour every night breed poisonous vapors and subtle megrims within my stomach, which humors, rising by their natural courses to my brain, do therein produce a fever that from within burneth up the fluids necessary to a healthy condition of the capillary growth upon the super-adjacent and exterior cranial integument.”
—Eugene Field, The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac.
Eugene Field also wrote, among many other works, the children's rhyme Wynken, Blynken & Nod. He had a childhood sweetheart with the marvellous name Captivity Waite. I wonder if she was any relation to the splendid Asenath Waite in H P Lovecraft's The Thing On The Doorstep? Glubb… glubb… glubb.