James also refused money; and still further enhanced his kindness, by accompanying the stranger to the top of the hill, where he gave him the best directions with respect to the road, and bade him an affectionate farewell.
Many years after this, a medical student from the neighbourhood was attending the lectures of the celebrated Dr. B—— of Edinburgh, who one evening intimated a desire to speak with him after the class was dismissed. He accordingly waited, and the doctor opened the conversation by inquiring if he knew an individual of the name of James W——, who lived near the village of Lindores. He was answered in the affirmative.
"Well," said the doctor, "I owe my life to the exertions of that old man and his wife; and I received my first lessons in medical science from them. When I was a student at the College of St. Andrews, I lost my way among the hills, and was nearly smothered among the snow. I at last discovered their cottage, and was kindly admitted. Like all good knights of misventure, I fainted and fell down upon the floor. James and his wife held a consultation over me, and I afterwards came to learn that even here 'doctors differed.' James was an Emperic, and argued from experience, or experiment, that cold water and friction was the best remedy for numbed fingers. Nanny adhered to the Dogmatics, and inferred, from reason and nature, that heat was the best application for driving away cold.
"Thus Epilogism and Dogmatism contended in the mouths of people who had probably never heard of the names of Aristotle and Plato in their lives. But, in my case, both the systems were adopted with advantage. I was resuscitated by the empiric with cold, and recovered by the theorist with heat. And, what is more wonderful still, my kind physicians, unlike all other members of the profession, refused to take any fee. But they are not forgotten. They cast their bread upon the water, and they shall find it again after many days."
We shall only add, that in a short time after this James received an elegant silver-mounted snuff-box, bearing the following inscription:—"From Dr B—— to James W——. 'I was a stranger, and ye took me in.'"
Nanny at the same time received a more useful present; and both rejoiced that they had once possessed an opportunity of being useful to a man whose genius had made him an honour to his country, and an ornament to the profession to which he belonged.
THE CROOKED COMYN.
Walter Comyn, Earl of Menteith, one of the "three Comyns," all earls, who, in the minority of Alexander III., possessed so much power in Scotland as to be able to oppose all the other nobility together, was a very remarkable man. Of low stature, deformed in his person, dark in his complexion, of gigantic strength—he possessed the spirit of a lion with the subtlety of a fox. Neither in the planning nor the executing of a political scheme could any man in Scotland or England cope with him. He made his two brothers, and the thirty-three knights who joined him against the measures of the English regency, his puppets, allowing them no will of their own, but subjugating them entirely to his direction. He could read the human countenance even of a courtier of Henry III. of England as easily as he could do the court hand of the clerks of his time; and, to complete his character, he so falsified the muscles of his face, by mixing up smiles and frowns in such a thorough confusion of activity and change, that no one could tell his thoughts or his feelings.
His wife, the countess, was directly the reverse of her husband. Tall in her person, handsomely formed, with graceful movements and accomplished manners, she was accounted open-hearted, good-humoured, approaching to simplicity, destitute of all guile and deceit. Her countenance wore a continual smile, and was so open and ingenuous, that it might be read like the page of a book. The best proof of her goodness was the kindness she exhibited to the deformed partner of her life. She boasted—and he admitted—that she was the only person who could read him, not from her powers of penetration, but from his yielding relaxation of the deceptive discipline of his face and manners. He often remarked that it was fortunate for him that his Countess Margaret was so much of a child; for he felt and acknowledged that it was only in the presence of children that he considered himself safe in throwing off his disguise, and appearing for a time in his natural character. Such are the effects of ambition.