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