In those primitive days I not only prescribed medicines but supplied them, and Mr. Wellicum was my dispenser, as he had been my father’s before me. He had seemed an old man when I was Rose’s age and ventured into his aromatic domain, and to her therefore he must have worn an air of extreme antiquity. There was this difference in his attitude to the two of us: he had disliked, or at any rate discouraged, my visits, but he rejoiced to have Rose about him. He was a short, bow-legged, grizzled man, very hairy and ursine, known to the villagers as “Crusty Bob,” and by playing tricks on him the boys increased his bearishness; but to Rose he was the mildest and most subservient slave. Others, including myself, his timid employer, were allowed in the dispensary itself only with ungracious reluctance—the lobby by the trap-door in the window being the place of the public—but Rose could do as she wished there, always on the one condition that she must not taste. He even permitted her to help in pill rolling, and not a few of the village children have been known to beg her collusion in seeing that their physic was made less nasty. * * * * * Those were the days before motor-cars—I did not see a motor-car until I was well over forty or own one until I was fifty—when a country doctor and his horse were allies and friends. I rode a little, but mostly drove, and Silver and I were on terms of the closest intimacy. She was a chestnut mare with a whitey-grey mane and tail: hence her name. Speed, no doubt, is a great asset, especially for a busy doctor in a straggling district, but I shall always hold that we lost spiritually more than we gained materially when we substituted machinery for the horse. The horse, the school-book used to tell us, is the friend of man; and man needs friends. Petrol is his servant or his master, even his tyrant; petrol smoothes no difficulties, heals no wounds, restores no vitality, as a horse could do. On the other hand, justice compels me to admit that it has taken me to many a sick-bed at a pace that Silver would have thought unjust and have found impossible. In addition to Silver I had a bay mare named Jenny, as a second string. Both were affectionate and gentle, and Rose adored them and took astonishing and terrifying liberties with them. Some part of the ritual of grooming, in which she was proud to assist, she even carried into her own toilet. The peculiar hissing sound which ostlers make when they are curry-combing, Rose used to imitate (Hannah told me, with tears of mirth) as she brushed her hair.