“Yes,” Jenny said, “she _should_ come back;” and back this morning Jenny came. But as her wounds were almost completely well, she had tied packthread round them so as to cut deep into the flesh, had rubbed dirt into them, and, in short, had played such tricks as nearly to produce a mortification in one of her fingers.
The most worthless fellow on the whole property is one Nato,--a thief, a liar, a runaway, and one who has never been two days together out of the hospital since my arrival, although he has nothing the matter with him; indeed, when the other negroes abused him for his laziness, and leaving them to do his work for him, he told them plainly that he did not mean to work, and that nobody should make him. The only real illness which brought him to the hospital, within my knowledge, was the consequence of a beating received from his own father, who had caught him in the act of robbing his house by the help of a false key. In the hospital he found his wife, Philippa, the mad woman, with whom he instantly quarrelled, and she cut his head open with a plate; and as she might have served one of the children in the same way, we were obliged to confine her. Her husband was thought to be the fittest person to guard her; and accordingly they were locked up together in a separate room from the other invalids, till a straight waistcoat could be made. The husband was then restored to freedom, and desired to go to work, which he declared to be impossible from illness; yet he disappeared the whole of the next day; and on his return on the following morning, he had the impudence to assert that he had never been out of the hospital for an hour. For this runaway offence, and for endeavouring to exasperate his wife’s phrensy, he was put into the bilboes for two days: on the third he was released; when he came to me with tears in his eyes, implored me most earnestly to forgive what had past, and promised to behave better for the future, “to so good a massa.” It appeared afterwards, that he had employed his absence in complaining to Mr. Williams, a neighbouring magistrate, that, “having a spite against them, although neither he nor his wife had committed any fault, I had punished them both by locking them up for several days in a solitary prison, under pretence of his wife’s insanity, when, in fact, she was perfectly in her senses.” Unluckily, one of my physicians had told Mr. Williams, that very morning, how much he had been alarmed at Cornwall, when, upon going into a mad woman’s room, her husband had fastened the door, and he had found himself shut up between them; the woman really mad, and the man pretending to be so too. The moment that Nato mentioned the mad woman as his wife, “What then,” said Mr. Williams, “you are the fellow who alarmed the doctor so much two days ago?” Upon which Nato had the impudence to burst into a fit of laughter,--“Oh, ki, massa, doctor no need be fright; we no want to hurt him; only make lilly bit fun wid him, massa, that all.” On which he was ordered to get out of Mr. Williams’s house, slunk back into the Cornwall hospital, and in a few days came to me with such a long story of penitence, and “so good massa,” that he induced me to forgive him.