“Stay, stay! Sure it will do me good?”
“Possibly, possibly; no harm in trying. Good-bye.”
“Stay, stay; give me three more boxes, and here’s the money.”
“My friend,” returning towards him with a sadly pleased sort of air, “I rejoice in the birth of your confidence and hopefulness. Believe me that, like your crutches, confidence and hopefulness will long support a man when his own legs will not. Stick to confidence and hopefulness, then, since how mad for the cripple to throw his crutches away. You ask for three more boxes of my liniment. Luckily, I have just that number remaining. Here they are. I sell them at half-a-dollar apiece. But I shall take nothing from you. There; God bless you again; good-bye.”
“Stay,” in a convulsed voice, and rocking himself, “stay, stay! You have made a better man of me. You have borne with me like a good Christian, and talked to me like one, and all that is enough without making me a present of these boxes. Here is the money. I won’t take nay. There, there; and may Almighty goodness go with you.”
As the herb-doctor withdrew, the cripple gradually subsided from his hard rocking into a gentle oscillation. It expressed, perhaps, the soothed mood of his reverie.
CHAPTER XX.
REAPPEARANCE OF ONE WHO MAY BE REMEMBERED.
The herb-doctor had not moved far away, when, in advance of him, this spectacle met his eye. A dried-up old man, with the stature of a boy of twelve, was tottering about like one out of his mind, in rumpled clothes of old moleskin, showing recent contact with bedding, his ferret eyes, blinking in the sunlight of the snowy boat, as imbecilely eager, and, at intervals, coughing, he peered hither and thither as if in alarmed search for his nurse. He presented the aspect of one who, bed-rid, has, through overruling excitement, like that of a fire, been stimulated to his feet.
“You seek some one,” said the herb-doctor, accosting him. “Can I assist you?”