He went to Cheltenham and consulted Boisragon about his nerves, was recommended a course of the waters, and horse exercise.
The son of the weeper very naturally thought he had already "too much of water;" he, however, hired a nag, took a small suburban lodging, and as nobody spoke to him, nor seemed to care about him, he grew better, and felt sedately happy. This blest seclusion, "the world forgetting, by the world forgot," was not the predestined fate of Sighmon: odd circumstances always brought him into notice. The horse he had hired was a piebald, a sweet, quiet animal, warranted a safe support for a timid invalid. On this piebald did Dumps jog through the green lanes in brown studies.
One day as he passed a cottage, a face peered at him through an open window; he heard an exclamation of delight, the door opened, and an elderly female ran after him, entreating him to stop; much against the grain he complied.
"'Twas heaven sent you, sir," said his pursuer, out of breath; "give me for the love of mercy the cure for the rhumatiz."
"The rhumatiz, sir; I've the pains and the aches in my back and my bones--give me the dose that will cure me."
In vain Dumps declared his ignorance of the virtues of "medicinal gums." The more he protested, the more the old woman sued; when to his horror a reinforcement joined her from the cottage, and men, women, and children implored him to cure the good dame's malady. At length watching a favourable opportunity, he insinuated his heel into the side of the piebald, and trotted off, while entreaties mingled with words of anger were borne to him on the wind.
He determined to avoid that green lane in future, and rode out the next day in an opposite direction: as he trotted through a village a girl ran after him, shouting for a cure for the hooping cough, a dame with a low curtsey solicited a remedy for the colic, and an old man asked him what was good for the palsy. These unforeseen, these unaccountable attacks were fearful annoyances to so retiring a personage as Dumps. Day after day, go where he would, the same things happened. He was solicited to cure "all the ills that flesh is heir to." He was not aware (any more than the reader very possibly may be) that in some parts of England the country people have an idea that a quack doctor rides a piebald horse; _why_, I cannot explain, but so it is, and that poor Dumps felt to his cost. Life became a burthen to him; he was a marked man; _he_, whose only wish was to pass unnoticed, unheard, unseen; _he_, who of all the creeping things on the earth, pitied the glowworm most, because the spark in its tail attracted observation. He gave up his lodgings and his piebald, and went "in his angry mood to Tewksbury."