“What is the matter, my boy?” he asked.
“Lift me up a little, please,” I said, “I have such a pain in my side!”
“Ah!” he said, “it catches your breath. We must send for the old doctor.”
The old doctor was a sort of demigod in the place. Everybody believed and trusted in him; and nobody could die in peace without him any more than without my father. I was delighted at the thought of being his patient. I think I see him now standing with his back to the fire, and taking his lancet from his pocket, while preparations were being made for bleeding me at the arm, which was a far commoner operation then than it is now.
That night I was delirious, and haunted with bagpipes. Wandering Willie was nowhere, but the atmosphere was full of bagpipes. It was an unremitting storm of bagpipes—silent, but assailing me bodily from all quarters—now small as motes in the sun, and hailing upon me; now large as feather-beds, and ready to bang us about, only they never touched us; now huge as Mount Ætna, and threatening to smother us beneath their ponderous bulk; for all the time I was toiling on with little Davie on my back. Next day I was a little better, but very weak, and it was many days before I was able to get out of bed. My father soon found that it would not do to let Mrs. Mitchell attend upon me, for I was always worse after she had been in the room for any time; so he got another woman to take Kirsty’s duties, and set her to nurse me, after which illness became almost a luxury. With Kirsty near, nothing could go wrong. And the growing better was pure enjoyment.
Once, when Kirsty was absent for a little while, Mrs. Mitchell brought me some gruel.
“The gruel’s not nice,” I said.
“It’s perfectly good, Ranald, and there’s no merit in complaining when everybody’s trying to make you as comfortable as they can,” said the Kelpie.
“Let me taste it,” said Kirsty, who that moment entered the room.—“It’s not fit for anybody to eat,” she said, and carried it away, Mrs. Mitchell following her with her nose horizontal.
Kirsty brought the basin back full of delicious gruel, well boiled, and supplemented with cream. I am sure the way in which she transformed that basin of gruel has been a lesson to me ever since as to the quality of the work I did. No boy or girl can have a much better lesson than—to do what must be done as well as it can be done. Everything, the commonest, well done, is something for the progress of the world; that is, lessens, if by the smallest hair’s-breadth, the distance between it and God.