A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 57 



when in his ordinary health. When he is on his club, 

 as now, the elder Culpeper makes way for the younger, 

 and father's book becomes somewhat academic. 



In answer to my present inquiries, he says that 

 doctor seed him yesterday, and reckoned as how he 

 wouldn't be right till the stomach was mended. Yes, 

 he'd been middlin' bad ; corned on swimey-like in 

 the head, and the wind it terrified him all night. So 

 he runs on, cataloguing with real enjoyment the 

 sensations and motions of various parts of his inside, 

 and exercising the envied privileges of the family 

 invalid. I hear, not for the first time, that his heart 

 was right up in his mouth ; this he connects somehow 

 with cramps in the legs, " something crule." " I 

 'spect I got 'em when I was carter-boy. The roads 

 they was bad, then, I can tell you. I've knowed a 

 waggin go a-slidin' with the bottom on the road, and 

 the ruts was that deep as the wheels didn't tetch the 

 bottom. We'd have to stop, when we was goin' to 

 work in the mornin', and tip the water out of our 

 boots, and wear 'em like that all day ; no dryin' of 

 'em ; I 'spec's that's what's give me the cramps." 

 Likely enough, and much besides in those hard years, 

 poor Bish of the shaky frame and annual brownkiters 

 But you never gave yourself a fair chance, by reason 

 of the prodigious physicking you have suffered. All 



