Smugglers and Foresters [By M.R.S. Kettle]. Author's Ed (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE SMUGGLERS. I Was quite glad, yesterday, on my return from a long walk in the opposite direction to the gipsy camp, to find my kind little doctor's shaggy forest pony tied at the gate; and he himself chatting with Margaret about some ailment, real or fancied, of her baby's, while he waited for my coming home. Rashleigh went for him in the night, when my fever was at the highest, and he attended me through the remainder of my illness. His coat is as rough as the pony's, and Margaret says he must sleep as well as ride in it, for he is always ready, at a moment's notice, to come any distance to see even the poorest of his scattered patients, and bids defiance to any weather. The bodies of the people who inhabit the rude log huts of the forest are better looked after than their souls; and with little emolument and every hindrance in the practice of his duty, Mr. Meredith is in the saddle, crossing the loneliest heaths and most intricate lanes, often up to the girths in mud at every step, on the darkest nights of winter. The respect all seem to entertain for him is unbounded. According to Margaret, even the most hardened among the smugglers and poachers, whose hand is against every man, would not harm a hair of his head. He never interferes with them, nor asks unnecessary questions. If a child has a fever, or a man meets with an accident, even should it be a gun-shot wound, it is the same to him :?he is a patient and nothing more. It is for the magistrate, he says, to hunt out crime, for the benefit of the community. The cure of souls is in the clergyman's department. His duty is to heal, not to inflame. He is not blind, however, to the fearful demoralization such practices engender; and though, I see,he wishes to avoid terrifying me, or giving me a bad opinion...