ment from now till I
go to bed.'

III

Under the powerful influence of the near treatment and the absent
treatment together, my bones were gradually retreating inward and
disappearing from view. The good word took a brisk start, now, and went
on quite swiftly. My body was diligently straining and stretching, this
way and that, to accommodate the processes of restoration, and every
minute or two I heard a dull click inside and knew that the two ends
of a fracture had been successfully joined. This muffled clicking and
gritting and grinding and rasping continued during the next three
hours, and then stopped--the connections had all been made. All except
dislocations; there were only seven of these: hips, shoulders, knees,
neck; so that was soon over; one after another they slipped into their
sockets with a sound like pulling a distant cork, and I jumped up as
good as new, as to framework, and sent for the horse-doctor.

I was obliged to do this because I had a stomach-ache and a cold in
the head, and I was not willing to trust these things any longer in
the hands of a woman whom I did not know, and in whose ability to
successfully treat mere disease I had lost all confidence. My position
was justified by the fact that the cold and the ache had been in her
charge from the first, along with the fractures, but had experienced not
a shade of relief; and indeed the ache was even growing worse and worse,
and more and more bitter, now, probably on account of the protracted
abstention from food and drink.

The horse-doctor came, a pleasant man and full of hope and professional
interest in the case. In the matter of smell he was pretty aromatic, in
fact quite horsey, and I tried to arrange with him for absent treatment,
but it was not in his line, so out of delicacy I did not press it. He
looked at my teeth and examined my hock, and said my age and general
condition were favourable to energetic measures; therefore he would give
me something to turn the stomach-ache into the botts and the cold in
the head into the blind staggers; then he should be on his own beat
and would know what to do. He made up a bucket of bran-mash, and said
a dipperful of it every two hours, alternated with a drench with
turpentine and axle-grease in it, would either knock my ailments out of
me in twenty-four hours or so interest me in other ways as to make me
forget they were on the premises. He administered my first dose himself,
then took his leav