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for all that, the poor fellow was so sick, and pale, and peaking, that we all thought we should have to heave him overboard some day or bury him in Labrador moss.
‘But he did n't die after all, did he?’
said I.
‘Die? No!’
cried the Skipper; ‘not he!’
‘And so your fishing voyage really cured him?’
‘I can't say as it did, exactly,’ returned the Skipper, shifting his quid from one cheek to the other, with a sly wink at the
Doctor.
‘The fact is, after the doctors and the old herb-women had given him up at home, he got cured by a little black-eyed French girl on the
Labrador coast.’
‘A very agreeable prescription, no doubt,’ quoth the
Doctor, turning to me. ‘How do you think it would suit your case?’
‘It does n't become the patient to choose his own nostrums,’ said I, laughing.
‘But I wonder,
Doctor, that you have n't long ago tested the value of this by an experiment upon yourself.’
‘Physicians are proverbially shy of their own medicines,’ said he.
‘Well, you see,’ continued the Skipper,
we had a rough run down the Labrador shore; rainstorms and fogs so thick you could cut 'em up into junks with your jack-knife.
At last we reached a small fishing station away down where the sun does n't sleep in summer, but just takes a bit of a nap at midnight. Here Wilson went ashore, more dead than alive, and found comfortable lodgings with a little, dingy French oil merchant, who had a snug, warm house, and a garden patch, where he raised a few potatoes and turnips in the short summers,