He determined to avoid that green lane in future, and rode out the next day in an opposite direction: as he trotted through a village a girl ran after him, shouting for a cure for the hooping cough, a dame with a low curtsey solicited a remedy for the colic, and an old man asked him what was good for the palsy. These unforeseen, these unaccountable attacks were fearful annoyances to so retiring a personage as Dumps. Day after day, go where he would, the same things happened. He was solicited to cure "all the ills that flesh is heir to." He was not aware (any more than the reader very possibly may be) that in some parts of England the country people have an idea that a quack doctor rides a piebald horse; _why_, I cannot explain, but so it is, and that poor Dumps felt to his cost. Life became a burthen to him; he was a marked man; _he_, whose only wish was to pass unnoticed, unheard, unseen; _he_, who of all the creeping things on the earth, pitied the glowworm most, because the spark in its tail attracted observation. He gave up his lodgings and his piebald, and went "in his angry mood to Tewksbury." I ought ere this to have described my hero. He was rather _embonpoint_, but fat was not with him, as it sometimes is, twin brother to fun; _his_ fat was weighty, he was inclined to _blubber_. He wore a wig, and carried in his countenance an expression indicative of the seriousness of his turn of mind. He alighted from the coach at the principal inn at Tewksbury; the landlady met him in the hall, started, smiled, and escorted him into a room with much civility. He took her aside, and briefly explained that retirement, quiet, and a back room to himself were the accommodations he sought. "I understand you sir," replied the landlady, with a knowing wink, "a little quiet will be agreeable by way of change; I hope you'll find every thing here to your liking." She then curtseyed and withdrew. "Frank," said the hostess to the head waiter, "who _do_ you think we've got in the blue parlour? you'll never guess! I knew him the minute I clapped eyes on him; dressed just as I saw him at the Haymarket Theatre, the only night I ever was at a London stage play. The gray coat, and the striped trousers, and the hessian boots over them, and the straw hat out of all shape, and the gingham umbrella!" "Who is he, ma'am?" said Frank. "Why, the great comedy actor, Mr. Liston," replied the landlady, "come down for a holiday; he wants to be quiet, so we must not blab, or the whole town will be after him." This brief dialogue will account for much disquietude which subsequently befell our ill fated Dumps. People met him, he could not imagine why, with a broad grin on their features. As they passed they whispered to each other, and the words "inimitable," "clever creature," "irresistibly comic," evidently applied to himself, reached his ears.