But the village surgeon had not in old days the skilled nurse as his assistant: and it is now a recognized truth that, for the sick, the nurse is more important than the doctor. He sent his medicines, but how could he be sure that they were taken, or taken regularly? The whole system of nursing was as rude as the whole system of drainage. It was all happy-go-lucky. The story is well known of the doctor sending a bottle of mixture to a sick man, with the direction on it, "Before taken to be well shaken"--and finding on his arrival that the attendant had shaken up the patient pretty vigorously before administering the draught. The following story is perfectly true. A kind-hearted village doctor, finding that a poor woman he was attending needed nourishing food, got his wife to send her a jelly. Some time after he went to the cottage, found the ground-floor room untenanted, but heard a trampling, groaning, and struggling going on upstairs. He accordingly ascended to the bedroom, to see a labouring man sitting on the bed, holding up the sick woman's head, whilst another labouring man--her husband--was standing on the bed, one foot on each side of the patient, with a black kitchen kettle in his hand, endeavouring to pour the contents down her mouth. Both men were hot and perspiring freely, and the poor woman was gasping for breath and almost expiring under the treatment. "Good gracious!" exclaimed the doctor, "what are you about?" "Please, sir," answered the husband, blowing hard, and wiping his brow with his sleeve, "us've been giving her the medicine you sent down. It got all stiff and hard, so we clapped it into the kettle and gave it a bile, and was pouring it down my wife's throat. I couldn't hold her mouth open myself as well as mind the kettle, so I just called in my mate Thomas, to help and hold her up, and open her mouth for the kettle spout." The life of the village doctor is a hard one. Never certain of a meal, and never certain of a sound, undisturbed sleep, he has to take his victuals and his rest by snatches, but then he inhales the fresh, pure air, and that maintains him in health. He has to keep his natural weakness and natural impatience under great control. Conceive of a man who has had several broken nights and hard days' work, with a head swimming with weariness, called in to a critical case, that he has to diagnose at once. His faculties are not on the alert, they cannot be, and if he make a mistake, an avalanche of abuse is poured down on him, whereas the fault lies not in himself, but in the circumstances. Then, again, how vexatious, when tired out and hungry, to be suddenly called away for a drive of many miles--perhaps over the very road he has just returned along--to see a _malade imaginaire_, some hypocondriacal old maid, who is best dosed with a bread pill, or to attend to some pet child--whose only complaint is that it has over-eaten itself, and who is well again by the time the doctor arrives.