I entertained too a most absurd idea--an idea that his
illness was partly affected. You see that I have made a
confession: this I hope--that I may always hereafter look
charitably upon the hard, savage acts of peasants, and the
cruelties of a "brutal" soldiery. God knows that I strived to melt
myself into common charity, and to put on a gentleness which I
could not feel, but this attempt did not cheat the keenness of the
sufferer; he could not have felt the less deserted because that I
was with him.
We called to aid a solemn Armenian (I think he was) half
soothsayer, half hakim, or doctor, who, all the while counting his
beads, fixed his eyes steadily upon the patient, and then suddenly
dealt him a violent blow on the chest. Methley bravely dissembled
his pain, for he fancied that the blow was meant to try whether or
not the plague were on him.
Here was really a sad embarrassment--no bed; nothing to offer the
invalid in the shape of food save a piece of thin, tough, flexible,
drab-coloured cloth, made of flour and mill-stones in equal
proportions, and called by the name of "bread"; then the patient,
of course, had no "confidence in his medical man," and on the
whole, the best chance of saving my comrade seemed to lie in taking
him out of the reach of his doctor, and bearing him away to the
neighbourhood of some more genial consul.
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