octor produced a revolver, and the heroes
vanished like smoke."

The good doctor is himself a Unionist, but more of a philanthropist
than a politician. He is the parish doctor, with eight thousand people
to look after, the whole being scattered over an immense area. I
accompanied him on a twenty-mile drive to see a girl down with
influenza, much of the road being almost impracticable. Some of his
experiences, coming out incidentally, were strange and startling. He
told me of a night when the storm was so wild that a man seeking him
approached the surgery on all-fours, and once housed, would not again
stir out, though the patient was his own wife. The doctor went alone
and in the storm and blackness narrowly escaped drowning, emerging
from the Jawun, usually called the Jordan, after an hour's struggle
with the flood, to sit up all night in his wet clothes, tending the
patient. On another occasion a mountain sheep frightened his horse
just as the doctor was filling his pipe. The next passer-by found him
insensible. Nobody might have passed for a month. A similar
misadventure resulted in a broken leg. Then on a pitchy night he
walked over the cliffs, and was caught near the brink by two rocks
which held him wedged tightly until someone found him and pulled him
up, with the bag of instruments, which he thinks had saved him. And it
was as well to pause in his flight, for the Menawn Cliffs, with their
thousand feet of clean drop, might have given the doctor an ugly fall.
Two girls, whose male relations had gone to England, had not been seen
for three days. Nobody would go near the house. The doctor found them
both on the floor insensible, down with typhus fever, shut up with the
pigs and cows, the room and its odour defying description. The
neighbours kept strictly aloof. Dr. Croly swept and garnished, made
fires, and pulled the patients through. "Sure, you couldn't expect us
to go near whin 'twas the faver," said the neighbourly Achilese. Mr.
Salt, the Brum-born mission agent, was obliged to remain all night on
one of the neighbouring islands--islands are a drug hereabouts--and
next morning he found an egg in his hat. Fowls are in nearly all the
houses. Sometimes they have a roost on the ceiling, but they mostly
perch on the family bed, when that full-flavoured Elysium is not on
the floor. I saw an interior which contained one black cow, one black
calf, some hens, some ducks, two black-and-white pigs, a mother, and
eleven c