Immediately he put Spalton to question ... and everything and everybody to question....
He irritated Spalton most by attacking doctors ... (though Spalton himself did so in his magazine) ... Spalton's father was an old family practitioner....
But the Master's revenge came.
"Pete" fell sick. Spalton sent for his father to doctor him. And made the old man use a strong horse-medicine on him ... which he himself brought up from the stables....
"The boy is such an ass ..." Spalton told me laughingly, "that it's a veterinarian he needs, not a doctor."
There was Speedwell, the young naturalist ... a queer, stooping, gentle, shy thing, who talked almost as an idiot would talk till he got on his favourite topic of bird and beast and flower. In personal appearance he was a sort of Emerson gone to weed ... he walked about with a quick, perky, deprecative step....
"—queer fish," John remarked of him, "but, Razorre, you ought to come on him in the woods ... there he is a different person ... he sits under a tree till he seems to become part of the vegetation, the landscape ... when I had him out to camp with me last summer he would go off alone and stay away till we thought he had got lost, or had walked into a pond, in his simpleness, and drowned...."
We followed him, and watched him....
There he sat ... in his brown corduroys ... his lock of hair over his eyes ... that simple, sweet, idiotic expression, like sick sunshine, on his mouth....