“We must put an end to such alarms as this, Master Rayburn,” said Sir Morton angrily.
“Ay; and the sooner the better,” cried that gentleman, as he carefully re-bandaged the lad’s hurt.—“I wonder,” he said to himself, “whether Ralph has told him how he obtained his wound? Is this the beginning of the end?”
Chapter Fifteen.
What Sir Morton said.
Master Rayburn, the old scholar, angler, and, in a small way, naturalist, had no pretensions to being either physician or surgeon; but there was neither within a day’s journey, and in the course of a long career, he had found out that in ordinary cases nature herself is the great curer of ills. He had noticed how animals, if suffering from injuries, would keep the place clean with their tongues, and curl up and rest till the wounds healed; that if they suffered from over-eating they would starve themselves till they grew better; that at certain times of the year they would, if carnivorous creatures, eat grass, or, if herbivorous, find a place where the rock-salt which lay amongst the gypsum was laid bare, and lick it; and that even the birds looked out for lime at egg-laying time to form shell, and swallowed plenty of tiny stones to help their digestion.
He was his own doctor when he was unwell, which, with his healthy, abstemious, open-air life, was not often; and by degrees the people for miles round found out that he made decoctions of herbs—camomile and dandelion, foxglove, rue, and agrimony, which had virtues of their own. He it was who cured Dan Rugg of that affection which made the joints of his toes and fingers grow stiff, by making him sit for an hour a day, holding hands and feet in the warm water which gushed out of one part of the cliff to run into the river, and coated sticks and stones with a hard stony shell, not unlike the fur found in an old tin kettle.
He knew that if a man broke a leg, arm, or rib, and the bones were laid carefully in their places, and bandaged so that they could not move, nature would make bony matter ooze from the broken ends and gradually harden, forming a knob, perhaps, at the joining, but making the place grow up stronger than ever; and it took no great amount of gumption to grasp the fact that what was good for a cut finger was equally good for arm, head, leg, or thigh; that is to say, to wash the bleeding wound clean, lay the cut edges together, and sew and bandage them so that they kept in place. With a healthy person, nature did all the rest, and Master Rayburn laughed good-humouredly to himself as he found that he got all the credit.
“Nature doesn’t mind,” he used to say to one or other of the lads. “There’s no vanity there, my boys; but I’m not half so clever as they think.”