"But, tell him the lad may bleed to death."

"I did."

"And what did he say?"

"Why, only, 'D-n him; what do I care?'"

It ended, however, in his sending one of his sons, who, though not
brought up to "the surgering trade," was able to do what was necessary in
the way of bandages and plasters. The excuse made for the surgeon was,
that "he was near eighty, and getting a bit doited, and had had a matter
o' twenty childer."

Among the most unmoved of the lookers-on was the brother of the boy so
badly hurt; and while he was lying in a pool of blood on the flag floor,
and crying out how much his arm was "warching," his stoical relation
stood coolly smoking his bit of black pipe, and uttered not a single word
of either sympathy or sorrow.

Forest customs, existing in the fringes of dark wood, which clothed the
declivity of the hills on either side, tended to brutalize the population
until the middle of the seventeenth century. Execution by beheading was
performed in a summary way upon either men or women who were guilty of
but very slight crimes; and a dogged, yet in some cases fine,
indifference to human life was thus generated. The roads were so
notoriously bad, even up to the last thirty years, that there was little
communication between one village and another; if the produce of industry
could be conveyed at stated times to the cloth market of the district, it
was all that could be done; and, in lonely houses on the distant hill-