Country Quarters by Theodore Martin — Read

A pleasanter little town than Potterwell does not exist in that part of her Majesty's dominions called Scotland. On one side, the hand of cultivation has covered a genial soil with richness and fertility. The stately mansion, "bosomed high in tufted trees," occasionally invites the eye, as it wanders over the landscape; while here and there the river Wimpledown may be seen peeping out amid the luxuriant verdure of wood and plain, and seeming to concentrate on itself all the radiance of any little sunshine that may be going. On the other side, again, are nothing but impracticable mountains -- fine bluff old fellows -- that evidently have an extensive and invincible contempt for Time, and, like other great ones of the earth, never carry any change about them. Look beyond these, and the prospect is indeed a fine one -- a little monotonous, perhaps, but still a fine one -- peak receding behind peak in endless series, a multitudinous sea of mountain tops, with noses as blue as a disappointed man's face, or Miss Harriet Martineau's stockings.

With a situation presenting such allurements for the devotees of the picturesque, is it wonderful that Potterwell became a favourite resort? By the best of good fortune, too, a spring close by, of a peculiarly nauseous character, had, a few years before the period we write of, attracted attention by throwing into violent convulsions sundry cows that had been so far left to themselves as to drink of it, besides carrying off an occasional little boy or so, as a sort of just retribution for so far suppressing his natural tastes as to admit it within his lips. Dr Scammony, however, had taken the mineral water under his patronage; and his celebrated pamphlet upon the medicinal properties of the Potterwell Mephitic Assafœtida Waters at once fixed their reputation, while it materially augmented his own. A general subscription was projected, with a view to the erection of a pump-room. The plan took amazingly; and, from being left to work its way out, as best it might, through the diseased and miserable weeds with which it was overgrown, the spring all at once found itself established in a handsome apartment, fitted up with a most benevolent attention to the wants of such persons as might repair thither with the probable chance -- however little they might be conscious of the fact -- of dying by a watery death.