ou'll find it will do you a
lot of good"; and, making a virtue of a somewhat imperative necessity,
he added: "I'll stay by you. If you'd let go of me a minute I'd give you
something that would settle you."

"You've settled me now, you damned anarchist. Takin' the bread out of
the mouth of an English workin'man! But I'll keep 'old of you till I'm
well or dead. I never did you no 'arm. S'pose I were a little full. They
pumped me out once at Guy's with a stummick-pump. I could see that, but
I can't see this 'ere, an' it's killin' of me by slow degrees."

"You'll be all right in half-an-hour. What do you suppose I'd want to
kill you for?" said the doctor, who came of a logical breed.

"'Ow do I know? Tell 'em in court. You'll get seven years for this, you
body-snatcher. That's what you are--a bloomin' bodysnatcher. There's
justice, I tell you, in England; and my Union'll prosecute, too. We
don't stand no tricks with people's insides 'ere. They give a woman ten
years for a sight less than this. An' you'll 'ave to pay 'undreds an'
'undreds o' pounds, besides a pension to the missus. You'll see, you
physickin' furriner. Where's your licence to do such? You'll catch it, I
tell you!"

Then I observed what I have frequently observed before, that a man who
is but reasonably afraid of an altercation with an alien has a most
poignant dread of the operations of foreign law. The doctor's voice was
flute-like in its exquisite politeness, as he answered:

"But I've given you a very great deal of money--fif-three pounds, I
think."

"An' what's three pound for poisonin' the likes o' me? They told me at
Guy's I'd fetch twenty-cold-on the slates. Ouh! It's comin' again."

A second time he was cut down by the foot, as it were, and the straining
bench rocked to and fro as I averted my eyes.

It was the very point of perfection in the heart of an English May-day.
The unseen tides of the air had turned, and all nature was setting its
face with the shadows of the horse-chestnuts towards the peace of the
coming night. But there were hours yet, I knew--long, long hours of the
eternal English twilight--to the ending of the day. I was well content
to be alive--to abandon myself to the drift of Time and Fate; to absorb
great peace through my skin, and to love my country with the devotion
that three thousand miles of intervening sea bring to fullest flower.
And what a garden of Eden it was, this fatted, clipped, and washen land!
A man could c