"Shorge, my poy," were the first words passed by my ears into any superior part, "now you let your tongue come—very slowly. Put a good soup at the back of him, then put him in his house quietly, and go to shleep again."
"But you haven't finished cooking the partridges yet; and I want to have the one that is over."
This cupidity might scarcely seem to prove the possession of high intellect, yet Hopmann declares that the noblest utterance has never afforded him so fine a moral. "Zat Frenchman! Vot he know, to talk so quick? No fear for a prain with a memory like zat. Shorge, they kill bairds all the year round here. Go to shleep while I cook you four bartriches."
For another week he took good care to keep me in a state of body which wanted no motion of the mind inside it, nor even any quick heart-action, except at the sight of a knife and fork. But I feel ashamed to say how long the disabled body was the lord of all, and the nobler elements of our existence were not allowed even to speak to it.
"I have dishpelled his shister and his sweetheart off," I heard Dr. Hopmann say to some one whom I could not see, after he had attended to my straps one day. "Vot they want? I tell you no. I let you help, because you not care. His leetle prain stand nothing yet."
"But I do care, because it was all through me," the reply was in a sweet low voice, as I caught a glimpse of a fair young lady, dressed in black and retiring towards the door; "you may have got rid of his sister, doctor, but there is one you will never get rid of, so you may just as well give it up. How much longer? And I am sure it would do him good. Why only yesterday I knew——"
"Ach, you be off! I am ze master here. We are not in England, where ze vimmen rule the roast."
The lady departed hastily, as if she had found that over-true, while the German bolted the heavy door, and came back with a grin on his solid ruddy face.
"Am I never to see any one again," I muttered, for gratitude does not flourish and abound with a man who has spent two months on his back, "nobody but a confounded German, who bolts everybody out?"
"Zat is shoost vot I vant to hear. Shorge, zat proves how you come round. If you say, 'Dank you, Tochtor Hopmann, you have saved my life, I shall never forget it, how can I ever hope to recompensh you?' then I know that your prain is very weak, not fit for healthy Englishman's at all. But when you call him a 'confounded Sherman,' he know, he see, that the nation have come up, which is the most obstinate of nature not to die. All the same, you lie down again. The world go on very well without you, Shorge."