the two-foot rule with which he had been taking
measurements. "You've tried a change of diet?"

"I fancy," Mr. Olver suggested, "he is worried by the number of
visitors--ladies especially."

"Georgiana Pescod has been worrying?"

The patient lifted his right hand from the bed and spread out all its
fingers; lifted his left, and spread out three more.

"What? Eight visits?"

"And that's not the worst of it," put in the Nurse, Mrs. Snell,
sympathetically, smoothing the coverlet. "First and last there's
been forty-two in these six days. It can't be for his looks, as I
tell en; and his name bein' Solomon won't account for the whole of
it."

"I sometimes think," said the Doctor pensively and with entire
gravity, turning to his assistant, "we shall have to diminish the
numbers of the Visiting Committee. My dear friend Hymen planned it,
in years gone by, on a war footing; and even so I remember suggesting
to him at the time that the scale was somewhat--er--grandiose.
But it was characteristic of him, and we have clung to it for that
reason, in a spirit perhaps _too_ piously conservative. Forty-two
ladies! My good fellow"--he turned to the patient--"I really think--
if your leg is equal to it--a short stroll in the fresh air may be
permitted. Pray do not think we desire to hurry your cure.
Even setting aside the dictates of charity, and our natural
tenderness towards one who, as I understand, has bled for our common
country, we owe you something"--the Major's fingers plucked nervously
at the bed-clothes--"some reparation," the Doctor went on, "for
the--er--character of your reception. In short, I hope, on your
complete recovery, to find you some steady employment, such as too
many of our returning heroes are at this moment seeking in vain.
In the meanwhile our town has some lions which may amuse your
convalescence--a figurative term, meaning objects of interest."

Once or twice, in the course of his first stroll, the Major's eyes
came near to brimming with tears. The town itself had suffered
surprisingly little change. The Collector--he seemed scarcely a day
older--stood as of old at the head of the Custom House stairs, and
surveyed the world benignly with his thumbs in the arm-holes of his
waistcoat. Before the Major's own doorway the myrtles were in bloom,
and a few China roses on the well-trimmed standards. By the Broad
Ship as of old his nostrils caught the odours of tar and hemp with a
whiff of smo