Page:Such Is Life.djvu/156

142 the retainer's face) had selected in sight of the very wool-shed; and now all working bullocks found loafing on the run were to be yarded at the station—this lot being specially noticed, for Muster M'Intyre had a bit of a derry on Alf.

By way of changing the subject, Sollicker became confidential. He had been in his present employ ever since his arrival in the country, ten years before, and had never set foot outside the run during that time. He was married, three years ago come Boxing Day, to the station bullock-driver's daughter; a girl who had been in service at the house, but could n't hit it with the missus. Muster M'Intyre wanted to see him settled down, and had fetched the parson a-purpose to do the job. He had only one of a family; a little boy, called Roderick, in honour of Muster M'Intyre. His own name (true to the 9th rule of the Higher Nomenology) was Edward Stanley Vivian—not Zedekiah Backband, as the novel-devouring reader might be prone to imagine—and his age was forty-four. If I knew anyone in straits for a bit of ready cash, I was to send that afflicted person to him for relief. He liked to oblige people; and his tariff was fifteen per cent. per annum; but the security must be unexceptionable.

I gave him some details of Alf's sickness, and asked whether he had any medicine at home—Pain-killer, by preference. I have great faith in this specific; and I'll tell you the reason.

A few years before the date of these events, it had been my fortune to be associated, in arduous and unhealthy work, with fifteen or twenty fellowrepresentatives of the order of society which Daniel O'Connell was accustomed to refer to as 'that highly important and respectable class, the men of no property'—true makers of history, if the fools only knew, or could be taught, their power and responsibility. Occasionally one of these potential rulers and practical slaves would come to me with white lips and unsteady pace

"I say, Tom; I ain't a man to jack-up while I got a sanguinary leg to stan' on; but I'm gone in the inside, some road. I jist bin slingin' up every insect-infected sanguinary thing I've et for the last month; an' I'm as weak as a sanguinary cat. I must ding it. Mebbe I'll be right to-morrow, if I jist step over to the pub., an' git"

Here I would stop him, and endeavour to establish a diagnosis. But a man with the vocabulary of a Stratford wool-comber (whatever a woolcomber may be) of the 16th century—a vocabulary of about two hundred and fifty words, mostly obscene—is placed at a grave disadvantage when confronted by scientific terminology; and my patient, casting symptomatic precision to the winds, and roughly averaging his malady, would succinctly describe himself as sanguinary bad. That was all that was wrong with him. Nevertheless, having a little theory of my own respecting sickness, I always undertook to grapple with the complaint. I had noticed as a singular feature in Pain-killer, that the more it is diluted, the more unspeakably nauseous and suffocating it becomes; wherefore, my medicine chest consisted merely of a couple of bottles of this rousing drug. My practice was to exhibit half-a-dozen tablespoonfuls of the panacea in a