holiday finery her young eyes
perhaps that morning had turned with pleasure, and white as snow was the
neck which was thus displayed; "this will suffice to bind his arm."

"But the book," said the father, in great perplexity--"the book telleth
us not how the lancet should be applied. It is easy to say, 'Do this and
do that;' but to do it once, it should have been done before. This is
not among my experiments."

Luckily, perhaps, for Marmaduke, at this moment there entered an old
woman, the solitary servant of the house, whose life, in those warlike
times, had made her pretty well acquainted with the simpler modes of
dealing with a wounded arm and a broken head. She treated with great
disdain the learned authority referred to by her master; she bound the
arm, plastered the head, and taking upon herself the responsibility to
promise a rapid cure, insisted upon the retirement of father and child,
and took her solitary watch beside the bed.

"If it had been any other mechanism than that of the vile human body!"
muttered the philosopher, as if apologizing to himself; and with that he
recovered his self-complacency and looked round him proudly.

CHAPTER V. WEAL TO THE IDLER, WOE TO THE WORKMAN.

As Providence tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, so it possibly might
conform the heads of that day to a thickness suitable for the blows and
knocks to which they were variously subjected; yet it was not without
considerable effort and much struggling that Marmaduke's senses
recovered the shock received, less by his flesh-wound and the loss of
blood, than a blow on the seat of reason that might have despatched a
passable ox of these degenerate days. Nature, to say nothing of Madge's
leechcraft, ultimately triumphed, and Marmaduke woke one morning in full
possession of such understanding as Nature had endowed him with. He
was then alone, and it was with much simple surprise that he turned his
large hazel eyes from corner to corner of the unfamiliar room. He began
to retrace and weave together sundry disordered and vague reminiscences:
he commenced with the commencement, and clearly satisfied himself that
he had been grievously wounded and sorely bruised; he then recalled the
solitary light at the high lattice, and his memory found itself at
the porch of the large, lonely, ruinous old house; then all became a
bewildered and feverish dream. He caught at the vision of an old man
with a long beard, whom he associated, displeasin