old lady, who quarreled with her "old man" on principle, and
seldom came out second best. "Faith, an' the murtherin' wretch has half
killed ye, Burrill, dear."

"I was that scart with the screamin'," said the mother of three, "that I
nearly let the baby fall a-runnin' here."

And then they all gathered around Mrs. Burrill, and talked vigorously,
and all together, while Brooks, hovering near the doctor, pursued his
investigation.

"A bad lot, that Burrill, sir. I've seen him, frequent; and so he's had
occasion to know you, sir?"

"No, my good fellow; I never had the honor of meeting Mr. John Burrill
before," replied Doctor Heath, smiling at the man's pertinacity.

"Now, I want to know," exclaimed Brooks, in accents of real distress,
"then what _could_ have set him off like that?"

"I suppose we were getting too many for him," replied the doctor,
easily.

"Not a bit of it, sir. Burrill ain't no coward, especially when he's in
liquor; and he and me's on good enough terms, too; though, of course,"
said Brooks, recollecting himself, and glancing anxiously at the
reclining figure of the injured one, "of course, I would never stand by
and see a lady struck down, sir."

"Manifestly not," replied the doctor, drily. "Then, as he would not fear
you, and could not fear me, he must have been in the first stages of
'snake seeing.'"

"It's my opinion, he took you for somebody else, as he has reasons to be
afraid of," said one of the women, with an emphatic nod.

But here the voice of the heroine of the occasion rose high above the
rest.

"John Burrill wasn't so drunk as to run away from a man he never saw, or
to see crooked," she said, fiercely. "I saw the look on his face,
blinded tho' I was, and he's afraid of _you_, Doctor Heath. I don't know
why. There's some secrets in John Burrill's life that I don't know, and
there's more that I wish I didn't know; but here, or somewhere else, he
has known you, sir. Perhaps only by sight; but he's afraid of you,
that's certain."

There was no reply from Doctor Heath; he was busy over his medicine
case. He prepared a lotion, to be applied to the bruises, and a
sedative, to be applied to the nerves of the patient, who was beginning
to recover herself in a measure, and launched out into a torrent of
invective against the author of her trouble; after which she rushed into
a wild recital of her wrongs, beginning at the time when she left a good
place in England, to follow the fortune