The man then assured him that if he would let him try, he would put it in in a minute; and, after a laborious explanation, Beauchamp consented. The old man pulled his foot as if he would have pulled it off the old woman squeezed his ankle as if she would have broken it through the middle; but at length, with a sudden snap, the bone started back into its place, and the patient found instant relief. Every attempt to stand, however, was still quite out of the question; and Beauchamp, giving himself entirely up into the hands of such skillful chirurgeons, suffered his ankle to be bandaged up with cloths steeped in vinegar and brandy, and himself to be carried to bed, where the smuggler assured him he ought to lie for at least four days, in order to perfect his recovery. When all was completed, and, his host and hostess were retiring, Beauchamp listened for a moment, and heard the key of the door turned with greater satisfaction than he had imagined the fact of being locked into his own room would ever afford him. CHAPTER XXIX. Now, Henry Burrel was a great deal too sincere a man, even in his commune with himself, to endeavor by any means to cheat himself into the belief that he was a hero. In short, he had quite sufficient real enthusiasm in his disposition, and quite sufficient contempt for those who affected it without having any, to make him very jealous of letting the portion he did, possess appear openly, even before his own eyes; and, in order to correct such propensities, he had got up, as we have shown before, a system of apathetic indifference to every thing that did not affect himself, which, though sometimes run away with by his zeal or his affections, contrived generally to bridle feelings that would otherwise have been somewhat headstrong. Left alone in a little bed, in a little room in a smuggler's cottage, on the loneliest part of the sea-shore--locked in, without being able to set a foot to the ground--without a light--and with a confounded smell of fish pervading the whole atmosphere--his first impulse, as all these minor miseries tickled his imagination one after the other, was to laugh heartily. But the impression lasted but a moment; and, when he thought of the more remote, but more dreadful, circumstances connected by an inseparable link with his temporary situation--the murder of a helpless old man, which he doubted not had been committed--the fearful moral offense which three of his fellow-creatures had perpetrated--and the miserable fate of a youth in whom he had taken considerable interest--for he had recognized, as we have before hinted, the voice of poor Wat Harrison--when he thought of all these circumstances, his heart smote him for the moment of levity in which he had indulged; and poured out the full tide of its generous and kindly feelings to wash away the fault of that one instant.