Nicky-Nan, Reservist | Page 5

Hundred of Powder, will be noticed
an indentation of the littoral line, in which cleft lies the little town of
Polpier. Tall hills, abrupt and rugged, shut in a deep and tortuous valley,
formed by the meeting of smaller coombs; houses, which seem dropped
rather than built, crowd the valley and its rocky ledges; a rapid rivulet
dances in and out among the dwellings, till its voice is lost in the waters
of a tidal haven, thronged with fishing boats and guarded by its Peak of
serried rock."
The Doctor after this first modest mention of "a rivulet" invariably
writes of it as "the River," and by no other name does Polpier speak of
it to this day. On the lower or seaward side of the bridge-end, where the
channel measures some three yards across, the flank of his house
leaned over the rushing water, to the sound of which he slept at night.
Across the stream the house of Mr Barrabell, clerk, leaned forward at a
more pronounced angle, so that the two neighbours, had they been so
minded, might have shaken hands between their bedroom windows
before retiring to rest. Tradition reports this Mr Barrabell (though an
accountant for most of the privateering companies in Polpier) to have
been a timorous man: and that once the Doctor, returning home in the
small hours from a midwifery case, found his neighbour and his
neighbour's wife hiding together under his bed-clothes. Upon an alarm
that Bonaparte was in the town, they had bridged the stream with a
ladder to the Doctor's open window and clambered across in their
night-clothes. It is reported also that, on the transit, Mrs Barrabell was
heard to say, "Go forward, Theophilus! Th' Old Doctor knows all about
me, if he don't about you. You can trust en to the ends of the world."
"That's right enough, ma'am," said the Doctor in his great way; "but
you appear to have gone a bit further." A variant of the story has it that
Mrs Barrabell was found beneath the bed, and her spouse alone
between the bed-clothes, into which he had plunged with an

exhortation, "Look after yourself, darling!" "And what do you think
Theophilus found under that magnificent man's bed?" she asked her
neighbours next day. "Why, naught but a plumed hat in a japanned case;
no trace of alarm, and yet ready there against any emergency."
The Doctor (I should say) had held a commission--worn a Major's
uniform--in the local Artillery Volunteers during those days of the
Napoleonic peril. They passed, and he survived to die in times of peace,
leaving (as has been told) a local history for his memorial. A tablet to
his memory records that "_In all his life he never had a lawsuit. Reader,
take example and strive to be so good a man_."
In his childhood Nicky-Nan had listened to many a legend of the Old
Doctor, whose memory haunted every street and by-lane and even
attained to something like apotheosis in the talk of the older inhabitants.
They told what an eye he had, as a naturalist, for anything uncommon
in the maunds; how he taught them to be observant, alert for any
strange fish, and to bring it home alive, if possible; and how he was
never so happy as when seated on a bollard near the Quay-head with a
drawing-board on his knee, busy--for he was a wonder with pencil and
brush--transferring to paper the outline and markings of a specimen and
its perishable exquisite colours; working rapidly while he listened to
the account of its capture, and maybe pausing now and again to pencil a
note on the margin of the portrait. They told, too, of his ways--how for
a whole month he came forth from his front door in a crouching posture,
almost on all fours, so as not to disturb the work of a diadem spider that
had chosen to build its web across the porch; of his professional skill,
that "trust yourself to th' Old Doctor, and he'd see you came to a natral
end of some sort, and in no haste, neither;" of his habit of dress, that
(when not in martial uniform) he wore a black suit with knee-breeches,
silk stockings, and silver shoe-buckles; of his kindness of heart, that in
the Notes of Periodic Phenomena, which he regularly kept, he always
recorded a midnight gale towards the close of August, to account for
the mysterious depletion of his apple-crop.
But the Old Doctor had gone to his fathers long ago, and the old house,
divided into two tenements--with access by one porch and front

passage--had been occupied for twenty years past by Nicky-Nan and
(for eight or nine) by the Penhaligon family. Nicky-Nan's cantle
overhung the river, and comprised a kitchen and