hout capital to
build a Parsonage House."

He was his own architect, his own builder, and his own clerk of the works.
The cost of building a house, with borrowed money, made him a very poor man
for several years.

"I turned schoolmaster, to educate my son, as I could not afford to
send him to school. Mrs. Sydney turned schoolmistress, to educate my
girls, as I could not afford a governess. I turned farmer, as I could
not let my land.... Added to all these domestic cares, I was village
parson, village doctor, village comforter, village magistrate, and
Edinburgh Reviewer; so you see I had not much time on my hands to
regret London."

Every one has heard of "Bunch," the "little garden-girl, shaped like a
milestone," who "became the best butler in the county"; of the gaunt
riding-horse "Calamity," which "flung me over his head into a neighbouring
parish, as if I had been a shuttlecock, and I felt grateful that it was not
into a neighbouring planet"; and of the ancient carriage called "the
Immortal," which was so well known on the road that "the village-boys
cheered it and the village-dogs barked at it"--and surely remembrance
should be made, amid this goodly caravan, of the four draught-oxen, Tug and
Lug, Haul and Crawl, even though "Tug and Lug took to fainting, and
required buckets of salvolatile, and Haul and Crawl to lie down in the
mud."

When Sydney Smith says that he was "village doctor," he reminds us of his
lifelong fancy for dabbling in medicine. When his daughter, not six months
old, was attacked by croup, he gave her in twenty-four hours "32 grains of
calomel, besides bleeding, blistering, and emetics." When he was called to
baptize a sick baby, he seized the opportunity of giving it a dose of
castor oil. One day he writes--

"I am performing miracles in my parish with garlic for
whooping-cough."

Another:--

"We conquered the whooping-cough here with a pennyworth of salt of
tartar, after having filled them with the expensive poisons of
Halford.[63] What an odd thing that such a specific should not be more
known!"

"I attended two of my children through a good stout fever of the
typhus kind without ever calling in an apothecary, but for one day. I
depended upon blessed antimony, and watched anxiously for the time of
giving bark."

"Douglas[64] alarmed us the other night with the Croup. I darted into
him all the mineral a