“And when she died, Dr. Marshall took a fancy to me. I could tell you a good deal about him if it were worth while. He was a physician of the old school, learned in experience rather than in books. It is probable that he made mistakes; but I’m equally certain that he learned by them. The week after mother died he asked your grandfather if he could have me to wash bottles and make myself generally useful in his surgery at Axcombe. And my father didn’t refuse. It would have been unlike him if he had done so; for I think his idea in life was to let every individual work out his own salvation for himself. It was a good plan, for it made the responsibility definite. . . . “So I went to Axcombe to Dr. Marshall’s house. There was plenty of hard work in it. I think a country doctor earns a poor living more honestly than most men. I had to share the doctor’s work—getting up early in the morning (that was no hardship to a miner’s son)—to clean up the surgery (and I can tell you it took some cleaning), to turn out of bed in the middle of the night to harness the pony if the message that called him took him over roads, or to saddle the cob if the hill tracks were too rough for wheels. “Sometimes I had long night journeys on my own; for the doctor, in spite of his practical head for dealing with disease, was curiously unmethodical and would often leave behind the particular instrument that he wanted most, and in the middle of the night a boy of my own age from one of the hill villages would come battering at the door as though his life depended on it. And they’d go on battering, you know, as if they thought that the sound of it would make me get up more quickly. Perhaps it did: at any rate I can remember scrambling downstairs in the dark and reading the notes that the doctor sent by candlelight: and then I would turn out, half asleep, and walk over the hills above Axcombe when the gorge was swimming to the brim with fine milky mist and a single step, if one were silly enough to go dreaming, would have sent one spinning down, a sheer four hundred feet like the hunting king in the legend. I’m forgetting that you don’t know the legend and have never seen the gorge. . . . “Still, I shall never forget those strange night-journeys. I don’t think I had begun to appreciate Mendip until I walked the hills at night. I found that I could think so clearly, and I was just beginning, you see, to have so much to think about. Books. . . .