the doctor
quietly, "and I know you've but wits enough for one thing at a time.
Your business now is to keep Dan'l hidden till you can smuggle him out of
the country: and if Dr. Martyn or I can help, you may count on us, for I
hate such foul play as Deiphobus Geen's, and so, I believe, does my
assistant."

With that the doctor took his leave of Dan'l and was driven home by
Tummels, William Sleep remaining to stand guard: and next day, according
to promise, Dr. Martyn was told the secret and trusted with the case.

II.

Sure enough, Dr. Martyn turned out to be most clever and considerate;
a man that Dan'l took to and trusted from the first. His one fault was
that when Dan'l began to converse with him on religious matters, he showed
himself a terrible free-thinker. The man was not content to be a doctor:
night after night he'd sit up and tend Dan'l like a nurse, and would talk
by the hour together when the patient lay wakeful. But his opinions were
enough to cut a religious man to the heart.

Dan'l had plenty of time to think over them, too. From daybreak (when the
young doctor took his leave), till between ten and eleven at night (when
he came again) was a terrible lonely while for a man shut in an empty
house and unable to move for pain. As the days wore on and his wound
bettered, he'd creep to the door and sit watching the fields and the ships
out at sea and William Sleep moving about the slope below. Sometimes he
would spend an hour in thinking out plans for his escape; but his money
had gone with the lugger, and without money no plan seemed workable.
Sometimes he'd think upon the girl Amelia Sanders. But that was crueller
pain; for if he could not even escape, how on earth was he to get married?
So he fell back on thoughts of religion and in making up answers to the
doctor's terrible arguments; and these he would muster up at night,
tackling the young man finely, till the two were at it like a pair of
wrestlers. But when Dan'l began to grow flushed and excited, and
stammered in his speech, the talk would be turned off somehow to
smuggling, or sport, or natural history--in all of which the doctor had a
hundred questions to ask. I believe these discussions worked the cure
faster than any ointments or lotions: but Dan'l used to say afterwards
that the long days came nigh to driving him mad; and mad they would have
driven him but for a small bird--a wheatear--that perched itself every day
on the wall of th