which he slept
at night. Across the stream the house of Mr Barrabell, clerk, leaned
forward at a more pronounced angle, so that the two neighbours, had
they been so minded, might have shaken hands between their bedroom
windows before retiring to rest. Tradition reports this Mr Barrabell
(though an accountant for most of the privateering companies in
Polpier) to have been a timorous man: and that once the Doctor,
returning home in the small hours from a midwifery case, found his
neighbour and his neighbour's wife hiding together under his
bed-clothes. Upon an alarm that Bonaparte was in the town, they had
bridged the stream with a ladder to the Doctor's open window and
clambered across in their night-clothes. It is reported also that,
on the transit, Mrs Barrabell was heard to say, "Go forward,
Theophilus! Th' Old Doctor knows all about _me_, if he don't about
you. You can trust en to the ends of the world." "That's right
enough, ma'am," said the Doctor in his great way; "but you appear to
have gone a bit further." A variant of the story has it that Mrs
Barrabell was found beneath the bed, and her spouse alone between the
bed-clothes, into which he had plunged with an exhortation, "Look
after yourself, darling!" "And what do you think Theophilus found
under that magnificent man's bed?" she asked her neighbours next day.
"Why, naught but a plumed hat in a japanned case; no trace of alarm,
and yet ready there against any emergency."

The Doctor (I should say) had held a commission--worn a Major's
uniform--in the local Artillery Volunteers during those days of the
Napoleonic peril. They passed, and he survived to die in times of
peace, leaving (as has been told) a local history for his memorial.
A tablet to his memory records that "_In all his life he never had a
lawsuit. Reader, take example and strive to be so good a man_."

In his childhood Nicky-Nan had listened to many a legend of the Old
Doctor, whose memory haunted every street and by-lane and even
attained to something like apotheosis in the talk of the older
inhabitants. They told what an eye he had, as a naturalist, for
anything uncommon in the maunds; how he taught them to be observant,
alert for any strange fish, and to bring it home alive, if possible;
and how he was never so happy as when seated on a bollard near the
Quay-head with a drawing-board on his knee, busy--for he was a wonder
with pencil and brush--transferring to paper the outline an