“My nag had died, and the terrible drought of 1846 forced me to relinquish the horse I had hired, and for five months I performed all my visits on foot, often travelling from six to ten miles to see one patient....
“These were trying times; but what if the elements were unpropitious? I had food and shelter for myself and family,—blessings about which I had often been in doubt,—and I was fully prepared to let ‘the heathen rage, and the people imagine’ what they chose!... The first winter was one of great severity; the weather was very changeable, and the most awful snow-storms were often succeeded by heavy rains, and the roads so horrid as to be impassable on horseback or in carriages. I had a patient five miles distant, sick with lung fever, and, in an attendance of forty days I made thirty journeys on foot (three hundred miles to attend one patient!) His recovery added much to my reputation, and I received for my services a new cloak and coat, which I much needed, and a hive of honey bees!...
“An old horse which I again hired of a friend had a polite way of limping, and was a source of much merriment among my patrons. I persistently attributed what they deemed a fault entirely to the politeness of the quadruped; and this nag, with my plain and rustic appearance, endeared me to the laboring population, and thus my calamities became my greatest friends. My fortune changed, and the experience and name I had acquired now came in as capital in trade, and a flood of ‘luck’ soon followed.”
Abernethy’s Boyhood.
Seated upon the outside of an ancient London stage-coach, to which were attached four raw-boned, old horses, just ready to start for Wolverhaven one pleasant afternoon, you may easily imagine, kind reader,—for it is a fact,—a chubby-faced, commonplace little boy, some ten years old, with another like youthful companion,—“two Londoners,”—while comfortably ensconced within, in one corner of the vehicle, is a large, stern-looking old gentleman, in “immense wig and ruffled shirt.”
THE POLITE QUADRUPED.
The stage-horn is sounded, the driver cracks his whip, the sleepy old nags wake up, the coach rocks from side to side, and in a moment more the team is off for its destination.
Why! the reader is readily reminded of the scene of “Old Squeers,” taking the wretched little boys down to his “Academy,” in Yorkshire, “where youth were boarded, clothed, furnished with pocket-money,” and taught everything, from “writing to trigonometry,” “arithmetic to astronomy,” languages of the “living and dead” and “diet unparalleled!” Nevertheless it is another case, far before “Old Squeers” time.
The elderly gentleman, in top-wig and immense ruffles, was Dr. Robertson, teacher of Wolverhampton Grammar School, and the chubby little boy was Master John Abernethy. Who the “other boy” was is not known, as he never made his mark in after life. Says Dr. Macilwain,—