Heale? It's no concern of
mine: but as a professional man, I must stop that. You will certainly
be no credit to me if you kill yourself under my hands."
Tom went straight home, showed the blacksmith how to make a pair of
dumb-bells, covered them himself with leather, and sent them up the
next morning with directions to be used for half an hour morning and
evening.
And something--whether it was the dumb-bells, or the tonic, or
wholesome fear of the terrible doctor--kept Elsley for the next month
in better spirits and temper than he had been in for a long while.
Moreover, Tom set Lucia to coax him into walking with Headley. She
succeeded at last; and, on the whole, each of them soon found that
he had something to learn from the other. Elsley improved daily in
health, and Lucia wrote to Valencia flaming accounts of the wonderful
doctor who had been cast on shore in their world's end; and received
from her after a while this, amid much more--for fancy is not
exuberant enough to reproduce the whole of a young lady's letter.
"--I am so ashamed. I ought to have told you of that doctor a
fortnight ago; but, rattle-pate as I am, I forgot all about it. Do
you know, he is Sabina Mellot's dearest friend; and she begged me to
recommend him to you; but I put it off, and then it slipped my memory,
like everything else good. She has told me the most wonderful stories
of his courage and goodness; and conceive--she and her husband were
taken prisoners with him by the savages in the South Seas, and going
to be eaten, she says: but he helped them to escape in a canoe--such
a story--and lived with them for three months on the most beautiful
desert island--it is all like a fairy tale.
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