cliff, and tilled it assiduously. Being a man who could do with a
very little sleep, he would often be found hard at work there by nine
in the morning, after a long night's fishing.

Thus, though always on the edge of poverty, he had managed his
affairs--until four years ago, when the trouble began with his leg.

At first he paid little heed to it, since it gave him no pain and
little more than a passing discomfort. It started, in fact, as a
small hard cyst low down at the back of the right thigh, incommoding
him when he bent his knee. He called it "a nut in the flesh," and
tried once or twice to get rid of it by squeezing it between fingers
and thumb. It did not yield to this treatment.

He could not fix, within a month or so, the date when it began to
hurt him. But it had been hurting him, off and on, for some weeks,
when one night, tacking out towards the fishing-grounds against a
stiffish southerly breeze, as he ran forward to tend the fore-sheet
his leg gave way under him as if it had been stabbed, and he rolled
into the scuppers in intolerable anguish. For a week after this
Nicky-Nan nursed himself ashore, and it was given out that he had
twisted his knee-cap. He did not call in a doctor, although the
swelling took on a red and angry hue. As a fact, no medical man now
resided within three miles of Polpier. (When asked how they did
without one, the inhabitants answered gravely that during the summer
season, when the visitors were about, Dr Mant came over twice a-week
from St Martin's; in the winter they just died a natural death.)

At any rate Nicky-Nan, because he was poor, would not call in a
doctor; and, because he was proud, would not own to anything worse