However, there is no luck for some people. One night, when I felt sure that all the cottage was asleep, I had taken off the bandages, and was pumping very happily on my left forearm, where the flesh had been torn, when there in the stableyard before me, conspicuous in the moonlight, with a blazing satin waistcoat, stood the only man who could do justice to it. For this gallant fellow had a style of his own, which added new brilliance to the most brilliant apparel.
"Why, Tom," I cried, "where on earth do you come from? I can't shake hands, or I shall spoil some of your charms. Why, you must have been dining with the governor. New togs again! What a coxcomb it is!"
"Never would I have sported these, and indeed I would never have come down at all, if I had known Grace was out of the way."
He was allowed to call her _Grace_ to me.
"How slow it is without her! But I say, old chap, what a frightful arm you've got! Pitchfork again, I suppose"--for I had received a scratch before--"only ten times as bad. Why, you mustn't neglect this. You'll have it off at the elbow, if you do. Why, even by this light--By Jove, what a whacking arm you've got! Why, it is twice the size of mine. I could never have believed it. Let me pull off my coat, and show you."
"But you cannot want one the size of mine"--I answered with a laugh, for it was thoroughly like Tom to fetch everything into his own person; "you could never put it into a waistcoat like that."
"George, you are an ass," was his very rude reply, and it seemed to ring into me far beyond his meaning. "My dear fellow, you will be, in your own parish, what nobody has seen anywhere,--a dead jackass,--if you go on like this. There is a black stripe down your arm; the same as you see on a 'mild-cured-haddy' when he shines by moonlight. What does that mean? Putrefaction."
"Rot!" I replied, meaning his own words. "I'll pump on you, waistcoat and all, my dear Tom, if you go on with this sort of rubbish." And yet I had some idea that he might be right. But the worst--as I need not tell any strong young fellow--of the absurdities our worthy doctors try to screw into us now--that a man must not draw the breath the Lord breathed into him, for fear of myrio-mycelia-micro-somethings, neither dare to put his fork into the grand haunch of mutton which his Maker ordered him to arise and eat--of all such infantile stuff the harm is this, that it makes a healthy man deride the better sense that is in them.