us
Save that which has made.
Nor yet beyond reason
Nor hope shall we fall--
All things have their season,
And Mercy crowns all.
Then, doubt not, ye fearful--
The Eternal is King--
Up, heart, and be cheerful,
And lustily sing:
What chariots, what horses,
Against us shall bide
While the Stars in their courses
Do fight on our side?
A Doctor of Medicine
They were playing hide-and-seek with bicycle lamps after tea. Dan had
hung his lamp on the apple tree at the end of the hellebore bed in the
walled garden, and was crouched by the gooseberry bushes ready to dash
off when Una should spy him. He saw her lamp come into the garden and
disappear as she hid it under her cloak. While he listened for her
footsteps, somebody (they both thought it was Phillips the gardener)
coughed in the corner of the herb-beds.
'All right,' Una shouted across the asparagus; 'we aren't hurting your
old beds, Phippsey!'
She flashed her lantern towards the spot, and in its circle of light
they saw a Guy Fawkes-looking man in a black cloak and a steeple-crowned
hat, walking down the path beside Puck. They ran to meet him, and the
man said something to them about rooms in their head. After a time they
understood he was warning them not to catch colds.
'You've a bit of a cold yourself, haven't you?' said Una, for he ended
all his sentences with a consequential cough. Puck laughed.
'Child,' the man answered, 'if it hath pleased Heaven to afflict me with
an infirmity--'
'Nay, nay,' Puck struck In, 'the maid spoke out of kindness. I know that
half your cough is but a catch to trick the vulgar; and that's a pity.
There's honesty enough in you, Nick, without rasping and hawking.'
'Good people'--the man shrugged his lean shoulders--'the vulgar crowd
love not truth unadorned. Wherefore we philosophers must needs dress her
to catch their eye or--ahem!---their ear.'
'And what d'you think of that?' said Puck solemnly to Dan.
'I don't know,' he answered. 'It sounds like lessons.'
'Ah--well! There have been worse men than Nick Culpeper to take lessons
from. Now, where can we sit that's not indoors?'
'In the hay-mow, next to old Middenboro,' Dan suggested. 'He doesn't
mind.'
'Eh?' Mr Culpeper was stooping over the pale hellebore blooms by the
light of Una's lamp. 'Does Master Middenboro need my poor services,
then?'
'Save him, no!' said Puck. 'He is but a ho
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