out his nerves, was
recommended a course of the waters, and horse exercise.

The son of the weeper very naturally thought he had already "too much
of water;" he, however, hired a nag, took a small suburban lodging, and
as nobody spoke to him, nor seemed to care about him, he grew better,
and felt sedately happy. This blest seclusion, "the world forgetting,
by the world forgot," was not the predestined fate of Sighmon: odd
circumstances always brought him into notice. The horse he had hired was
a piebald, a sweet, quiet animal, warranted a safe support for a timid
invalid. On this piebald did Dumps jog through the green lanes in brown
studies.

One day as he passed a cottage, a face peered at him through an open
window; he heard an exclamation of delight, the door opened, and an
elderly female ran after him, entreating him to stop; much against the
grain he complied.

"'Twas heaven sent you, sir," said his pursuer, out of breath; "give me
for the love of mercy the cure for the rhumatiz."

"The what?" said Dumps.

"The rhumatiz, sir; I've the pains and the aches in my back and my
bones--give me the dose that will cure me."

In vain Dumps declared his ignorance of the virtues of "medicinal gums."
The more he protested, the more the old woman sued; when to his horror a
reinforcement joined her from the cottage, and men, women, and children
implored him to cure the good dame's malady. At length watching a
favourable opportunity, he insinuated his heel into the side of the
piebald, and trotted off, while entreaties mingled with words of anger
were borne to him on the wind.

He determined to avoid that green lane in future, and rode out the next
day in an opposite direction: as he trotted through a village a girl ran
after him, shouting for a cure for the hooping cough, a dame with a low
curtsey solicited a remedy for the colic, and an old man asked him what
was good for the palsy. These unforeseen, these unaccountable attacks
were fearful annoyances to so retiring a personage as Dumps. Day after
day, go where he would, the same things happened. He was solicited to
cure "all the ills that flesh is heir to." He was not aware (any more
than the reader very possibly may be) that in some parts of England the
country people have an idea that a quack doctor rides a piebald horse;
_why_, I cannot explain, but so it is, and that poor Dumps felt to
his cost. Life became a burthen to him; he was a marked man; _he_,
whose only w