k about all classes bein' at one in those times of national
trial and standin' shoulder to shoulder till it makes a body sick--do
you reckon they _mean_ a word of it? Do you reckon that if 'twas
Judgment Day itself, and you given to eatin' peas with a knife,
they'd really want you to luncheon?"

"But I _don't_."

"I'm puttin' it for the sake of argument--"

"Then I wish you wouldn't," Miss Oliver interrupted with some spirit.

"--And old Hambly kow-towing like a Puss-in-Boots till I could have
wrung his neck for him--and you weakenin' and playin' gentility as
you picked it up, like another cat after a mouse--and myself the only
one left to show 'em plain that we weren't to be put upon--yes, and
after you'd hoped, up to the very door, that whatever happened,
I'd take a proper stand!"

"Well, and so I did," Miss Oliver admitted defiantly. "But I didn't
ask you to make yourself _conspicuous_."

CHAPTER XIV.

POLSUE V. PENHALIGON, NANJIVELL INTERVENING.

At breakfast, two days later, Dr Mant received a summons to visit
Polpier and pronounce upon the symptoms of Boatbuilder Jago's
five-year-old son Josey (Josiah), who had been feverish ever since
Tuesday evening. The Doctor's practice ranged over a wide district,
and as a rule (good easy man) he let the ailments of Polpier
accumulate for a while before dealing with them. Then he would
descend on the town and work through it from door to door--as Un'
Benny Rowett put it, "like a cross between a ferret an' a Passover
Angel." Thus the child and his temperature might have waited for
thirty-six hours--the mothers of Polpier being skilled in febrifuges,
from quinine to rum-and-honey, treacle posset, elder tea--to be dealt
with as preliminaries to the ambulance lecture, had it not been that
(1) the Doctor had recently replaced his old trap with a two-seater
car, which lifted him above old economies of time, and (2) he wished
to ascertain if the valley schoolhouse, in which he was to lecture,
possessed a wall-chart or diagram of the human frame; for it is a
useful rule to start an ambulance class with some brief information
on the body and its organs, their position and functions. Also he
remembered casually an official letter received from Troy, a couple
of days ago, concerning one Nicholas Nanjivell, a reservist.
The man, if he remembered rightly, had an epithelioma somewhere in
his leg, and was quite unfit for service. Nevertheless he must be
visited: for