Even that was to begin with somewhat of an amusement, for a certain feeling of self-complacency comes with the first intermission. After the tortures and fires of the damned for some hours, the sudden and complete escape from them seems to rebound to the credit of your constitution, and you are confirmed in the impression that you are a fine fellow. But it is not long before the fever fiend can knock that sort of conceit out of a man if it chooses. In George's case it did choose, and, having got him well in its grip, refused, after a day or two, to let him go again.
The factotum lingered round with something he called beef-tea, and another thing he called barley-water. Which was which, the patient, with his mouth full of Dead Sea apples and quinine, could not say; nor after a time did he very much care. He cared for nothing; unless indeed it was to get rid of that vision of the schoolroom in the rectory--a schoolroom with a cheery-cheeked boy roasting blackbirds at the fire. If you didn't twist the bit of brown worsted stolen from your sister's work-basket, then the birds slackened--slackened like the potter's wheel. Oh! it was a lifetime of twisting, or there you were plumb, burning with a horrid smell. When the factotum sat in the room the blackbirds didn't; but then he breathed. Wasn't it rough that a man could not stop breathing for half-an-hour just to oblige a friend? Yet if the breathing beast sat outside, a '_whittering_, beast came in its place. '_Whitter! Whitter!_' under the bed; behind the boxes. That was the worst of a musk rat; no one could possibly tell where it would '_whitter_' next. It wasn't its fault, of course; it meant no harm. Poor little beggar! what a rummy sight it must be, if the yarn was true, taking its kids out for a walk, tail by tail, in a string! And then to George's infinite surprise and discomfiture, the feeble laugh ended in a flood of tears; tears like a woman's, drenching the dry, hot pillow. That was one comfort, they were as good as a water-cart! So they came again between the laughs; for George, seventy miles away from a white face, was down with the worst type of jungle fever.
Sometimes when he felt a little better the factotum brought out the medicine-chest and between them they made wonderful compounds, which the latter administered when his master had gone back to the blackbirds.