"Come on, my tousled macaroni!" said he. "There's nothing the matter with the inside of your head at any rate, though the outside looks as if you'd been arguing with the parish bull." "This is a verra fine house," said Maclachlan slowly and slily. "A mere dog-kennel," said the doctor, "considering she's a Parker Putwell." "And I'm thinking," said Maclachlan, very thoughtfully "that there'll be some guid victuals in the pantry and, mayhap, a gay wheen bottles of right liquor in the cellar." "Oh aye!" said he, taken aback. "Then I'm thinking we'll e'en have breakfast here and try their merits. And if it's a guid ane, I'll see you a Justice, whatever that may be, when the King enjoys his own again. A Maclachlan has spoken it." The doctor went to an inner door and bawled, "Euphemia," and a discontented wisp of a woman answered his call. "Madam and gentlemen, my wife, Mistress Snooks, born a Parker Putwell. Mistress Snooks, like me, will bow to your will with pleasure, nor will you mislike her table, I assure you. Now, my buck, let's see to this crack in your head." He took me into his druggery, unwrapped the bandage, and examined my wound. "So ho!" said he, "a right good sock on the head. How did it happen?" I told him. "It's lucky for you, my buck," he said, "that you've got a baby's flesh and a tup's skull, and some one had the sense to wash the cut clean as soon as it was done." He set to work and made a good job of it, with a pledget of lint and strips of plaister, and meanwhile I speculated as to why, in all these bottles and jars and gallipots, neither nature nor art could contrive to store a drug magistral for the blow that had riven my heart asunder. "That's better than two yards stripped off a wench's smock," he said at last. "And a damnably fine smock too, you lucky rascal." He twittered a snatch of ribaldry that made my foot twitch in my boot. Behind his back, I pocketed the priceless relic, dank and red with my unworthy blood, and followed him back to the company.